Fractional chiral superconductors
Abstract
Two-dimensional topological superconductors host gapless Majorana edge modes, as well as Majorana bound states at the core of 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 -wave superconductor. We define the filling factor as , where is the electronic density and is the spin-orbit length. Focusing on filling , with being an odd integer, we obtain a tractable model which allows us to study the properties of the bulk and the edge. Using an -expansion with , we show that the bulk Hamiltonian is gapped and that the edge of the sample hosts a chiral parafermion theory with central charge . The tunneling density of states associated with this edge theory exhibits an anomalous energy dependence of the form . Additionally, we show that parafermionic bound states reside at the cores of vortices. Upon constructing an appropriate Josephson junction in our system, we find that the current-phase relation displays a periodicity, reflecting the underlying non-abelian excitations.
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}
}