2016/12/17 by Isac Sahlberg, Alex Westström, Kim Pöyhönen +1 · 1 citation
Materials Science · Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Condensed Matter Physics #Combinatorics #Electronic and Structural Properties of Oxides #Geometry #Impurity #MAJORANA #Mathematics #Physics #Quantum mechanics #Scalar (mathematics) #Superconductivity #Topological Materials and Phenomena #Topology (electrical circuits) #cond-mat.mes-hall #cond-mat.supr-con
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevb.95.184512
published as Phys. Rev. B 95, 184512 (2017) · 8 pages, 4 figures
arxiv created 2016/12/17 · openalex created_date 2017/01/06 · openalex publication_date 2017/05/18 · arxiv updated 2017/05/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
In this paper, we study how, with the aid of impurity engineering, two-dimensional p-wave superconductors can be employed as a platform for one-dimensional topological phases. We discover that, while chiral and helical parent states themselves are topologically nontrivial, a chain of scalar impurities on both systems supports multiple topological phases and Majorana end states. We develop an approach which allows us to extract the topological invariants and subgap spectrum, even away from the center of the gap, for the representative cases of spinless, chiral, and helical superconductors. We find that the magnitude of the topological gaps protecting the nontrivial phases may be a significant fraction of the gap of the underlying superconductor.