Majorana corner modes in a high-temperature platform

Understand

We introduce two-dimensional topological insulators in proximity to high-temperature cuprate or iron-based superconductors as high-temperature platforms of Majorana Kramers pairs of zero modes.

• The proximity-induced pairing at the helical edge state of the topological insulator serves as a Dirac mass, whose sign changes at the sample corner because of the pairing symmetry of high-$T_c$ superconductors.
• This sign changing naturally creates at each corner a pair of Majorana zero modes protected by time-reversal symmetry.
• Conceptually, this is a topologically trivial superconductor-based approach for Majorana zero modes.