Chiral Majorana fermion

Abstract

The chiral Majorana fermion, is a massless fermionic particle being its own antiparticle, which was predicted to live in (1+1)D (i.e. one-dimensional space plus one-dimensional time) or (9+1)D. In condensed matter physics, one-dimensional (1D) chiral Majorana fermion can be viewed as the 1/2 of the chiral Dirac fermion, which could arise as the quasiparticle edge state of a two-dimensional (2D) topological state of matter. The appearance of an odd number of 1D chiral Majorana fermions on the edge implies that there exist the non-Abelian defects in the bulk. The chiral Majorana fermion edge state can be used to realize the non-Abelian quantum gate operations on electron states. Starting with the topological states in 2D, we illustrate the general and intimate relation between chiral topological superconductor and quantum anomalous Hall insulator, which leads to the theoretical prediction of the chiral Majorana fermion from the quantum anomalous Hall plateau transition in proximity to a conventional s-wave superconductor. We show that the propagation of chiral Majorana fermions leads to the same unitary transformation as that in the braiding of Majorana zero modes, and may be used for the topological quantum computation.