English

Impurity-induced states in superconducting heterostructures

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2018-05-02 v2 Superconductivity

Abstract

Heterostructures allow the realization of electronic states that are difficult to obtain in isolated systems. Exemplary is the case of quasi-one-dimensional heterostructures formed by a superconductor and a semiconductor with spin-orbit coupling in which Majorana zero-energy modes can be realized. We study the effect of a single impurity on the spectrum of superconducting heterostructures. We find that the coupling between the superconductor and the semiconductor can strongly affect the impurity-induced states and may induce additional subgap bound states that are not present in isolated uniform superconductors. For the case of quasi-one-dimensional superconductor/semiconductor heterostructures, we obtain the conditions for which the low-energy impurity-induced bound states appear.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1711.04056,
  title  = {Impurity-induced states in superconducting heterostructures},
  author = {Dong E. Liu and Enrico Rossi and Roman M. Lutchyn},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.04056},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

8 pages, 7 figures with a few minor changes

R2 v1 2026-06-22T22:42:46.670Z