English

Electrostatic effects and topological superconductivity in semiconductor-superconductor-magnetic insulator hybrid wires

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2021-12-08 v1

Abstract

We investigate the impact of electrostatics on the proximity effect between a magnetic insulator and a semiconductor wire in semiconductor-superconductor-magnetic insulator hybrid structures. By performing self-consistent Schro¨\ddot{\rm o}dinger-Poisson calculations using an effective model of the hybrid system, we find that large effective Zeeman fields consistent with the emergence of topological superconductivity emerge within a large parameter window in wires with overlapping layers of magnetic insulator and superconductor, but not in non-overlapping structures. We show that this behavior is essentially the result of electrostatic effects determining the amplitude of the low-energy wave functions near the semiconductor-magnetic insulator interface.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2011.01933,
  title  = {Electrostatic effects and topological superconductivity in semiconductor-superconductor-magnetic insulator hybrid wires},
  author = {Benjamin D. Woods and Tudor D. Stanescu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2011.01933},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

8 pages, 5 figures