Majorana fermions in condensed matter: An outlook

The Majorana fermions (MFs) were firstly envisioned by Majorana in 1937 as fundamental constituents of nature, whereas experimentally thus far unobserved in the realm of fundamental particles. More recent studies have revealed that the MFs could occur in condensed matter physics as emergent quasiparticle excitations in effectively spinless p-wave topological superconductors (TS). They are shown to behave as effectively fractionalized anyons following non-Abelian braiding statistics rather than the usual Fermi or Bose exchange statistics. This extraordinary property would directly lead to a perpetually coherent and fault tolerant topological quantum computation in 2D systems. Currently the experiments searching for MFs on much more special systems are ongoing and the investigations of MFs' behavior in TS-coupled systems are also been actively pursued, with the goal of deeply understanding the fundamental physics of fractional statistics in nature, and further paving more feasible ways toward a working universal topological quantum computer.