2011/05/31 by T. H. Hansson, T H Hansson, A. Karlhede +2 · 10 citations
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Chemical and Physical Properties of Materials #Connection (principal bundle) #Degeneracy (biology) #MAJORANA #Pfaffian #Quantum and electron transport phenomena #Superconductivity #Topological Materials and Phenomena #Topological degeneracy #Topological entropy in physics #Topological insulator #Topological order #cond-mat.supr-con #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1367-2630/14/6/063017
published in New Journal of Physics 14(6), 063017 (IOP Publishing) · 6 pages, Some explanatory text added, and the discussion of degeneracy on the torus reformulated
arxiv created 2012/05/06 · openalex publication_date 2012/06/14 · arxiv updated 2012/11/12 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We propose a topological field theory for a spinless two-dimensional (2D) chiral superconductor (SC) that contains fundamental Majorana fields. Due to a fermionic gauge symmetry, the Majorana modes survive as dynamical degrees of freedom only at magnetic vortex cores, and on edges. We argue that these modes have the topological properties pertinent to a p-wave SC including the non-Abelian braiding statistics, and we support this claim by calculating the ground state degeneracy on a torus. We also briefly discuss the connection to the Moore–Read Pfaffian quantum Hall state and extensions to the spinfull case and to 3D topological SCs.