No Arabic abstract
We investigate the inhomogeneous Rashba chain coupled to a superconducting substrate, hosting the Majorana quasiparticles near its edges. We discuss its subgap spectrum and study how robust are the zero-energy quasiparticles against the diagonal and off-diagonal disorder. Studying the $mathbb{Z}_2$ topological invariant we show that disorder induced transition from the topologically non-trivial to trivial phases is manifested by characteristic features in the spatially-resolved quasiparticle spectrum at zero energy. We provide evidence for the non-local nature of the zero-energy Majorana quasiparticles, that are well preserved upon partitioning the chain into separate pieces. Even though the Majorana quasiparticles are not completely immune to inhomogeneity we show that they can spread onto other (normal) nanoscopic objects via the proximity effect.
We demonstrate that the selective equal spin Andreev reflection (SESAR) spectroscopy can be used in STM experiments to distinguish the zero-energy Majorana quasiparticles from the ordinary fermionic states of the Rashba chain. Such technique, designed for probing the p-wave superconductivity, could be applied to the intersite pairing of equal-spin electrons in the chain of magnetic Fe atoms deposited on the superconducting Pb substrate. Our calculations of the effective pairing amplitude for individual spin components imply the magnetically polarized Andreev conductance, which can be used to `filter the Majorana quasiparticles from the ordinary in-gap states, although the pure spin current (i.e., perfect polarization) is impossible.
Superconducting wires with broken time-reversal and spin-rotational symmetries can exhibit two distinct topological gapped phases and host bound Majorana states at the phase boundaries. When the wire is tuned to the transition between these two phases and the gap is closed, Majorana states become delocalized leading to a peculiar critical state of the system. We study transport properties of this critical state as a function of the length $L$ of a disordered multichannel wire. Applying a non-linear supersymmetric sigma model of symmetry class D with two replicas, we identify the average conductance, its variance and the third cumulant in the whole range of $L$ from the Ohmic limit of short wires to the regime of a broad conductance distribution when $L$ exceeds the correlation length of the system. In addition, we calculate the average shot noise power and variance of the topological index for arbitrary $L$. The general approach developed in the paper can also be applied to study combined effects of disorder and topology in wires of other symmetries.
Coupling a semiconducting nanowire to a microwave cavity provides a powerfull means to assess the presence or absence of isolated Majorana fermions in the nanowire. These exotic bound states can cause a significant cavity frequency shift but also a strong cavity nonlinearity leading for instance to light squeezing. The dependence of these effects on the nanowire gate voltages gives direct signatures of the unique properties of Majorana fermions, such as their self-adjoint character and their exponential confinement.
We study transient effects in a setup, where the quantum dot (QD) is abruptly sandwiched between the metallic and superconducting leads. Focusing on the proximity-induced electron pairing, manifested by the in-gap bound states, we determine characteristic time-scale needed for these quasiparticles to develop. In particular, we derive analytic expressions for (i) charge occupancy of the QD, (ii) amplitude of the induced electron pairing, and (iii) the transient currents under equilibrium and nonequilibrium conditions. We also investigate the correlation effects within the Hartree-Fock-Bogolubov approximation, revealing a competition between the Coulomb interactions and electron pairing.
Symmetry-protected topological superconductors (TSCs) can host multiple Majorana zero modes (MZMs) at their edges or vortex cores, while whether the Majorana braiding in such systems is non-Abelian in general remains an open question. Here we uncover in theory the unitary symmetry-protected non-Abelian statisitcs of MZMs and propose the experimental realization. We show that braiding two vortices with each hosting $N$ unitary symmetry-protected MZMs generically reduces to $N$ independent sectors, with each sector braiding two different Majorana modes. This renders the unitary symmetry-protected non-Abelian statistics. As a concrete example, we demonstrate the proposed non-Abelian statistics in a spin-triplet TSC which hosts two MZMs at each vortex and, interestingly, can be precisely mapped to a quantum anomalous Hall insulator. Thus the unitary symmetry-protected non-Abelian statistics can be verified in the latter insulating phase, with the application to realizing various topological quantum gates being studied. Finally, we propose a novel experimental scheme to realize the present study in an optical Raman lattice. Our work opens a new route for Majorana-based topological quantum computation.