Towards Topological Superconducting Qubits

Topological superconductivity (TS) is a rare phase of matter with an unconventional superconducting pairing function compared with the archetypal s-wave pairing of weakly-coupled Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer theory. The TS state is accompanied by quasiparticle excitations that occur at the boundaries of a finite system and are robust to local perturbations smaller than the topological gap, making it a prime candidate for encoding quantum information in a physical substrate with long coherence times. These quasiparticles further exhibit non-trivial exchange statistics that may be used to implement high-fidelity quantum logic gates. Here we present progress in the realization of topological qubits in hybrid superconductor-semiconductor heterostructures, including advances toward the demonstration of their exchange statistics.