The Condensed Matter and Materials Theory and Condensed Matter Physics Programs jointly contribute support to this award. This award provides resources for a workshop that brings together theorists and experimentalists to discuss a possible new kind of superconductivity that may have application in the development of quantum computers. The workshop will be held at Rice University on April 24-25, 2018. Whether a material conducts electricity or not provides a natural classification of materials into metals like copper and insulators like silicon. Within the past 20 years, it was realized that insulators can be bit more interesting. There are the classic insulators like silicon and rubber, but there are also topological insulators which have an insulating bulk and intrinsic metallic states that surround the surfaces and edges. Bismuth selenide, a compound made from the elements of bismuth and selenium, provides an example of a topological insulator. Since the discovery of topological insulators, new classes of topological materials have been proposed, among these are topological superconductors. Superconductors have no resistance to the flow of electricity. This reflects the collective quantum mechanical behavior of the electrons in the superconducting state. Topological superconductors have a superconducting bulk. While topological insulators have associated metallic surface states, topological superconductors have exotic surface states that behave differently than collections of ordinary particles like electrons and photons - the "particles" of light, but in a way that could form the basis of computation by manipulation of a quantum mechanical state. Topological materials are robust to noise and defects that would disrupt most quantum mechanical states and severely limit their use in quantum computers. Driven by potential applications to quantum computing, there is now an intense worldwide search for materials that exhibit the experimental signatures of topological superconductors. This two-day workshop will bring together scientists from around the world that use experiments to probe candidate materials, as well as those that develop the theory and phenomenology of topological superconductivity. An important distinguishing feature of this workshop will be a focus on bulk topological superconducting materials and two-dimensional surface states. The workshop will address an acute need to gather and focus theoretical and experimental leaders in this nascent field, which has received much less attention than other efforts to engineer quantum computers. Graduate and undergraduate students will be encouraged to attend the workshop to excite interest in the next generation. A report on opportunities in research on topological superconductivity will result from this activity. This workshop is aligned with the NSF's Quantum Leap Big Idea.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
