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ABSTRACT - DRUM - University of Maryland

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find a realistic material in nature. Most electronic superconductors in metals have<br />

s-wave pairing, which can be traced back to the electron-phonon mediated pairing<br />

mechanism. To have the required p-wave pairing symmetry one clearly needs unconventional<br />

pairing mechanisms. There are a number <strong>of</strong> candidates, though, including<br />

the 3 He film in the superfluid A phase [44] and the oxide compound Sr 2 RuO 4 [45].<br />

Although a lot <strong>of</strong> experimental efforts have been taken, progress in identifying the<br />

topological superconductivity/superfluidity in both systems is quite limited. Among<br />

the many obstacles we just mention that in both cases, due to the spin degeneracy,<br />

to observe a single Majorana zero mode requires creating a half-quantum vortex in<br />

the superfluid [46], in which the phase <strong>of</strong> the order parameter and the Cooper pair<br />

spin vector both wind by π. However this type <strong>of</strong> vortices are not thermodynamically<br />

stable: Its free energy diverges logarithmically with the system size.<br />

This<br />

apparently hinders the observation <strong>of</strong> Majorana excitations. In addition, the unconventional<br />

p-wave pairing symmetry, believed to be caused by ferromagnetic spin<br />

fluctuations, results in very low superconducting transition temperature, making<br />

the experimental setup very delicate.<br />

Recent theoretical progress has revealed a completely new avenue towards realizing<br />

chiral p-wave superconductivity, which becomes by far the most promising<br />

direction in the search <strong>of</strong> non-Abelian superconductivity. The approach is to engineer<br />

chiral p-wave superconductor from conventional materials instead <strong>of</strong> trying<br />

one’s luck in nature. In particular, the stringent requirement <strong>of</strong> the p-wave pairing is<br />

removed and all the proposals only involve ordinary s-wave superconductivity. In the<br />

following we discuss three independent different proposals for the pratical realiza-<br />

19

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