Yoichi Ando has been awarded with the ERC Advanced Grant of the European Research Council for his project "Majorana Fermions in Topological Insulator Platforms". The ERC Advanced Grant is the most prestigious and competitive grant in Europe.
With the grant Prof. Ando aims to realize and explore exotic particles, Majorana Fermions, using the peculiar properties of topological insulators. Through the coupling of conducting surface states in these materials to superconductors, Yoichi Ando plans to engineer Majorana quantum states which allows for new ways to encode quantum information and perform computations in future quantum computers.