English

Chiral topological superconductor and half-integer conductance plateau from quantum anomalous Hall plateau transition

Superconductivity 2015-09-01 v3 Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics Strongly Correlated Electrons

Abstract

We propose to realize a two-dimensional chiral topological superconducting (TSC) state from the quantum anomalous Hall plateau transition in a magnetic topological insulator thin film through the proximity effect to a conventional ss-wave superconductor. This state has a full pairing gap in the bulk and a single chiral Majorana mode at the edge. The optimal condition for realizing such chiral TSC is to have inequivalent superconducting pairing amplitudes on top and bottom surfaces of the doped magnetic topological insulator. We further propose several transport experiments to detect the chiral TSC. One unique signature is that the conductance will be quantized into a half-integer plateau at the coercive field in this hybrid system. In particular, with the point contact formed by a superconducting junction, the conductance oscillates between e2/2he^2/2h and e2/he^2/h with the frequency determined by the voltage across the junction. We close by discussing the feasibility of these experimental proposals.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1507.00788,
  title  = {Chiral topological superconductor and half-integer conductance plateau from quantum anomalous Hall plateau transition},
  author = {Jing Wang and Quan Zhou and Biao Lian and Shou-Cheng Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1507.00788},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

9 pages, 5 figures