"Smoking gun" signatures of topological milestones in trivial materials by measurement fine-tuning and data postselection

• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2309.09368
• Publication Date: 2023-01-01
• Authors: Sergey Frolov; Po Zhang; Bomin Zhang; Yongbin Jiang; S. Byard; S. R. Mudi; Jie Chen; A. -H. Chen; Moïra Hocevar; Mohit Gupta; Colin Riggert; Vlad Pribiag
• Keywords: Mesoscopic physics; Topological insulator

Exploring the topology of electronic bands is a way to realize new states matter with possible implications for information technology. Because cannot always be observed directly, central question how tell that topological regime has been achieved. Experiments are often guided by prediction unique signal or pattern, called "the smoking gun". Examples include peaks in conductivity, microwave resonances, and shifts interference fringes. However, many condensed experiments performed on relatively small, micron nanometer-scale, specimens. These structures so-called mesoscopic regime, between atomic macroscopic physics, where phenomenology particularly rich. In this paper, we demonstrate trivial effects quantum confinement, charge dynamics nanostructures can reproduce accepted gun signatures triplet supercurrents, Majorana modes, Josephson junctions fractionalized particles. The examples use correspond milestones computing: qubit spectroscopy, fusion braiding. None samples regime. patterns achieved fine-tuning during data acquisition subsequent selection pick non-representative out fluid multitude similar do not generally fit "smoking gun" designation. Building insight, discuss ways experimentalists rigorously delineate non-topological effects, deeper analysis larger volumes data.