English

Helical Majorana edge mode in a superconducting antiferromagnetic quantum spin Hall insulator

Superconductivity 2018-09-12 v3 Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics

Abstract

A two-dimensional time-reversal symmetric topological superconductor is a fully gapped system possessing a helical Majorana mode on the edges. This helical Majorana edge mode (HMEM), which is a Kramer's pair of two chiral Majorana edge modes in the opposite propagating directions, is robust under time-reversal symmetry protection. We propose a feasible setup and accessible measurement to provide the preliminary step of the HMEM realization by studying superconducting antiferromagnetic quantum spin Hall insulators. Since this antiferromagnetic topological insulator hosts a helical electron edge mode and preserves effective time-reversal symmetry, which is the combination of time-reversal symmetry and crystalline symmetry, the proximity effect of the conventional s-wave superconducting pairing can directly induce a single HMEM. We further show the HMEM leads to the observation of an e2/he^2/h conductance, and this quantized conductance survives even in the presence of small symmetry-breaking disorders.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1708.05724,
  title  = {Helical Majorana edge mode in a superconducting antiferromagnetic quantum spin Hall insulator},
  author = {Yingyi Huang and Ching-Kai Chiu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1708.05724},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

6 pages, 4 figures, 4 pages of supplementary material