Much attention has recently been afforded to topological insulators, which constitute a unique state of matter, one fascinating aspect of which is that they show insulating behavior in the bulk, but also spin-dependent conduction channels on the surface, suggesting, among other things, a potential for spintronics applications. Moreover, topological insulators in the proximity of a superconductor could show excitations that satisfy non-Abelian (noncommutative) statistics, the so-called Majorana fermions, which may be used for quantum computation