On the problem of detecting Majorana fermions in heat capacity and Hall effect measurements in the Kondo insulator YbB$_{12}$

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 $\rm YbB_{12}$ 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.