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On the problem of detecting Majorana fermions in heat capacity and Hall effect measurements in the Kondo insulator YbB12a Prokhorov General Physics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, ul. Vavilova 38, Moscow, 119991, Russian Federation b Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (National Research University), Institutskii per. 9, Dolgoprudny, Moscow Region, 141701, Russian Federation c Lebedev Physical Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, Leninsky prosp. 53, Moscow, 119991, Russian Federation d Vereshchagin Institute for High Pressure Physics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Kaluzhskoe shosse 14, Troitsk, Moscow, 108840, Russian Federation e HSE University, ul. Myasnitskaya 20, Moscow, 101000, Russian Federation We show that the separation of contributions to low-temperature heat capacity and the Hall effect, carried out in Phys. Rev. Lett. 120 257206 (2018), Nat. Phys. 15 954 (2019), Phys. Rev. X 12 021050 (2022), leads to unfounded conclusions about (i) the formation of uncharged quasiparticles (Majorana fermions) and (ii) the transition, as the magnetic field increases, to the metallic state with heavy fermions in the YbB12 semiconductor with strong electronic correlations. We obtain an alternative explanation of the experimental data in terms of the filamentary structure of conducting channels in the semiconductor matrix of ytterbium-based dodecaborides. Such channels (charge stripes) are nanoscale electron-density inhomogeneities and form manybody states near the Fermi level.
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