Effect of substrate spin-orbit coupling on the topological gap size of Shiba chains
Abstract
Realizing Majorana bound states in chains of magnetic impurities on -wave superconducting substrates relies on a fine tuning of the energy and hybridization of the single magnetic impurity bound states and of the spin-orbit coupling (SOC). While recent experiments investigate the influence of the former two parameters, the effect of SOC remained experimentally largely unexplored. Here, we present a scanning tunneling spectroscopy study of close-packed Mn chains along the [001]-direction on Ta(110) which has almost identical atomic and surface electronic structure compared to the previously studied Nb(110) system, but a three times larger SOC. The dominant Shiba band has a very similar dispersion, but its minigap, taken relative to , is increased by a factor of 1.9 with respect to the Nb case, which can be ascribed to the stronger SOC.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2205.10062,
title = {Effect of substrate spin-orbit coupling on the topological gap size of Shiba chains},
author = {Philip Beck and Lucas Schneider and Roland Wiesendanger and Jens Wiebe},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.10062},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
We have reanalyzed the experimental data in this manuscript by comparison to extensive first-principles calculations. A new interpretation of the experimental data following from this comparison is published at https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2504.07509