2009/04/16 by Yaacov E. Kraus, Assa Auerbach, H. A. Fertig +1 · 3 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Condensed Matter Physics #Physics of Superconductivity and Magnetism #Topological Materials and Phenomena #cond-mat.str-el #cond-mat.supr-con
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevb.79.134515
published as Phys. Rev. B 79, 134515 (2009) · 15 pages, 17 figures
openalex publication_date 2009/04/16 · arxiv created 2009/04/19 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
To investigate Majorana fermionic excitations of a px+ipy superconductor, the Bogoliubov--de Gennes equation is solved on a sphere for two cases: (i) a vortex-antivortex pair at opposite poles and (ii) an edge near the south pole and an antivortex at the north pole. The vortex cores support a state of two Majorana fermions, the energy of which decreases exponentially with the radius of the sphere, independently of a moderate disorder potential. The tunneling conductance of an electron into the superconductor near the position of a vortex is computed for finite temperature and is compared to the case of an s-wave superconductor. The zero-bias conductance peak of the antivortex is half that of the vortex. This effect can be used as a probe of the order-parameter symmetry and as a direct measurement of the Majorana fermion.