ICTP Colloquium

ICTP is pleased to announce that Prof. Carlo Beenakker of Instituut-Lorentz at Leiden University in the Netherlands will be giving an ICTP Colloquium this Wednesday, October 25, at 16.30 CET. The talk, titled "Majorana Edge Modes in Topological Superconductors," will be given in ICTP's Budinich Lecture Hall and livestreamed on ICTP's Youtube and Facebook pages. ICTP's community online and in Trieste are all warmly invited to attend.

Beenakker is a professor of theoretical physics at Leiden University where he is the leader of the institute's theoretical nanophysics group. The group's focus is the fundamental physical problems that arise when a macroscopic object is minaturized to the nanoscale. Beenakker's body of work has earned him numerous distinctions, including the Spinoza Prize, the Netherlands' highest scientific honor.

In his talk, Beenakker will discuss edge states in superconductors, including recent experimental confirmations. The full abstract is as follows:

Two-dimensional superconductors with broken time-reversal symmetry have been predicted to support topologically protected chiral edge states, providing a superconducting counterpart to the quantum Hall effect in semiconductors. The edge states carry charge-neutral quasiparticles, coherent superpositions of electrons and holes referred to as "Majorana fermions". After several decades of unsuccesful search for these edge states, an experimental observation was reported earlier this year [Science 357, 294 (2017)]. We present an overview of electrical and thermal probes of the superconducting edge states, focusing on unique signatures of their Majorana nature. Background reading: "A road to reality with topologicalsuperconductors", arXiv:1606.09439.

Light refreshments will be served after the talk.