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Majorana and parafermion corner states from two coupled sheets of bilayer graphene

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 Added by Katharina Laubscher
 Publication date 2019
  fields Physics
and research's language is English




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We consider a setup consisting of two coupled sheets of bilayer graphene in the regime of strong spin-orbit interaction, where electrostatic confinement is used to create an array of effective quantum wires. We show that for suitable interwire couplings the system supports a topological insulator phase exhibiting Kramers partners of gapless helical edge states, while the additional presence of a small in-plane magnetic field and weak proximity-induced superconductivity leads to the emergence of zero-energy Majorana corner states at all four corners of a rectangular sample, indicating the transition to a second-order topological superconducting phase. The presence of strong electron-electron interactions is shown to promote the above phases to their exotic fractional counterparts. In particular, we find that the system supports a fractional topological insulator phase exhibiting fractionally charged gapless edge states and a fractional second-order topological superconducting phase exhibiting zero-energy $mathbb{Z}_{2m}$ parafermion corner states, where $m$ is an odd integer determined by the position of the chemical potential.



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