English

Majorana bound state localization and energy oscillations for magnetic impurity chains on conventional superconductors

Superconductivity 2019-12-11 v3 Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics

Abstract

We study a chain of magnetic impurities on a conventional superconductor with spin-orbit coupling, treating the superconducting order fully self-consistently. We find and quantify strong hybridization between the topological edge Majorana bound states (MBSs) and in-gap Yu-Shiba-Rusinov (YSR) states, which causes increasing energy oscillations as a function of magnetic impurity strength, even when the direct MBS overlap is negligible. By treating the MBS as a topological boundary state, dependent only on the effective mass gap, we arrive at a fully parameter-free functional form of the its localization which decreases with magnetic impurity strength, opposite to the behavior of the superconducting coherence length.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1808.10061,
  title  = {Majorana bound state localization and energy oscillations for magnetic impurity chains on conventional superconductors},
  author = {Andreas Theiler and Kristofer Björnson and Annica M. Black-Schaffer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1808.10061},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

7 pages, 5 figures