Abstract: 
Topological superconductor (TSC) represents an exotic quantum material with quasiparticle excitation manifesting in Majorana fermion, which can intrinsically arise from the topology-protected superconducting state. Here we propose the concept of ferroelectric (FE) TSC, which not only enriches the TSC phases but also significantly enables the sign of odd-parity pairing gap and hence the TSC phase to be easily tuned by electric field, in addition to the sign of Chern number switched by ferromagnetic field. While dispersive Majorana mode (DMM) is well known to exist at outer edges of a conventional TSC, DMM emerges also at inner domain walls between different FE TSC phases. The high tunability endows the domain-wall DMMs with a rich variety of transport characteristics. Furthermore, based on first-principles calculations, we demonstrate α-In2Se3 to be a promising FE TSC candidate in proximity with a ferromagnetic (Fe3GeTe2) and a superconductor substrate. We envision that FE TSC opens a new avenue for electrostatically tunable TSC phases to realize fault-tolerant quantum computation.

Prof. Liu received many honors and awards. He was elected as an APS fellow since 2008. He received Distinguished Scholarly and Creative Research Award in 2019. In 2023, He was awarded Davisson-Germer Prize in Atomic or Surface Physics. He also received outstanding referee for Physical Review Journals at 2021.

His research work focus on multi-scale computational materials research from first-principles electronic and atomic calculation to mesoscopic simulation and continuum modeling. He also work on surfaces, interfaces, thin films, nanostructured materials and devices, and energy materials and applications. Prof. Liu has published in total 355+ refereed work including 72 PRL, 2 Nature, 2 Nature Materials, 3 PNAS, 1 Chem. Rev. 7 Nature Communications, 19 Nano Letters, 5 ACS Nano, 4 Advanced Materials, 1 JACS and several book chapters. He has a H-index of 86 according to Google scholar.

Besides his research work, he also served as members of several review panels, member of editorial Board and he was a division associate editor of PRL. He is also founder of two start-up companies.