. . . To encourage the growth of any science, the best thing we can do is to meet together in its interest, to discuss its problems, to criticize each other's work and, best of all, to provide means by which the better portion of it may be made known to the world. . . .
Henry A. Rowland, the first president of the American Physical Society
ICMT Seminar
Title:
ICMT Seminar: "Topological Field Theory for p-wave Superconductors"
In this talk I will first give a short background to topological field theories for superconductors and then present recent results on a proposed a topological field theory for a spinless 2D chiral superconductor that contains fundamental Majorana fields. Due to a fermionic gauge symmetry, the Majorana modes survive as dynamical degrees of freedom only at magnetic vortex cores, and on edges. These modes have the topological properties pertinent to a p-wave superconductor including the non-abelian braiding statistics. I also briefly discuss the connection to the Moore-Read Pfaffian quantum Hall state, and extensions to the spin-ful case and to 3D topological superconductors.
Undergraduates
