Popular education, ‘so we stand’ and the 'triple self-diagnosis'

With funding from the Economic and Social Research Council, a novel project has taken place over the last two years under the title ‘Using Popular Education in Anti-Poverty and Environmental Justice Organising: Bridging Constituencies, Building Movements, and Crossing Disciplines’. The aim was not just to take a popular education approach to promoting social change but also to make learning about popular education a central part of the process

Superconducting proximity effect and Majorana fermions at the surface of a topological insulator

We study the proximity effect between an s-wave superconductor and the surface states of a strong topological insulator. The resulting two dimensional state resembles a spinless p_x+ip_y superconductor, but does not break time reversal symmetry. This state supports Majorana bound states at vortices. We show that linear junctions between superconductors mediated by the topological insulator form a non chiral 1 dimensional wire for Majorana fermions, and that circuits formed from these junctions provide a method for creating, manipulating and fusing Majorana bound states.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, published versio