English

Coulomb-interaction-induced Majorana edge modes in nanowires

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2019-10-29 v1

Abstract

We show that Majorana edge modes appear in a strongly correlated phase of semiconducting nanowires with discrete rotational symmetry in the cross section. These modes exist in the absence of spin-orbit coupling, magnetic fields and superconductivity. They appear purely due to the combination of the three-dimensional Coulomb interaction and orbital physics, which generates a fermionic condensate exhibiting a topological ground state degeneracy in a sector of the spectrum which is gapped to continuum modes. The gap can be comparable in magnitude to the topological superconducting gap in other solid-state candidate systems for Majorana edge modes, and may similarly be probed via tunnel spectroscopy.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1809.09564,
  title  = {Coulomb-interaction-induced Majorana edge modes in nanowires},
  author = {Tommy Li and Michele Burrello and Karsten Flensberg},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1809.09564},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

6 pages, 3 figures, 12 pages supplemental material