English

Fractional chiral superconductors

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2018-01-03 v1 Strongly Correlated Electrons

Abstract

Two-dimensional px+ipyp_x+ip_y topological superconductors host gapless Majorana edge modes, as well as Majorana bound states at the core of h/2eh/2e vortices. Here we construct a model realizing the fractional counterpart of this phase: a fractional chiral superconductor. Our model is composed of an array of coupled Rashba wires in the presence of strong interactions, Zeeman field, and proximity coupling to an ss-wave superconductor. We define the filling factor as ν=lson/4\nu=l_{\text{so}}n/4, where nn is the electronic density and lsol_{\text{so}} is the spin-orbit length. Focusing on filling ν=1/m\nu=1/m, with mm being an odd integer, we obtain a tractable model which allows us to study the properties of the bulk and the edge. Using an ϵ\epsilon-expansion with m=2+ϵm=2+\epsilon, we show that the bulk Hamiltonian is gapped and that the edge of the sample hosts a chiral Z2m\mathbb{Z}_{2m} parafermion theory with central charge c=2m1m+1c=\frac{2m-1}{m+1}. The tunneling density of states associated with this edge theory exhibits an anomalous energy dependence of the form ωm1\omega^{m-1}. Additionally, we show that Z2m\mathbb{Z}_{2m} parafermionic bound states reside at the cores of h/2eh/2e vortices. Upon constructing an appropriate Josephson junction in our system, we find that the current-phase relation displays a 4πm4\pi m periodicity, reflecting the underlying non-abelian excitations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1707.06654,
  title  = {Fractional chiral superconductors},
  author = {Eran Sagi and Arbel Haim and Erez Berg and Felix von Oppen and Yuval Oreg},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.06654},
  year   = {2018}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T20:53:18.467Z