Robustness of Majorana modes to a disorder potential in atomic chains on a superconducting Rashba alloy

Abstract Majorana modes offer great potential for fault-tolerant quantum computation due to their topological protection. However, intrinsic disorder makes the unambiguous detection of Majorana modes difficult in the commonly used hybrid superconductor–semiconductor nanowire platform. By contrast, for magnet–superconductor hybrid systems, Majorana modes were theoretically predicted to be very robust against disorder, but no experimental confirmation of this has been reported so far. Here we demonstrate that these modes are indeed robust in one-dimensional spin chains constructed from individual iron atoms on a Rashba surface alloy with proximity-induced superconductivity. Although the chains exhibit perfect crystalline order, we observe nanoscale potential disorder of the BiAg 2 /Ag(111)/Nb(110) heterostructure by scanning tunnelling microscopy. However, this does not prevent the emergence of zero-energy modes at both ends of the atomic chains, in agreement with tight-binding calculations showing that these modes are only found in the topologically non-trivial regime of the phase diagram. Our results explain the earlier observation of zero-energy Majorana modes in disordered Fe chains on other superconducting substrates, and may provide an avenue for the realization of Majorana qubits.