English

Thermoelectric effect in the Kondo dot side-coupled to a Majorana fermion

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2014-08-22 v1

Abstract

We investigate the linear thermoelectric response of an interacting quantum dot side-coupled by one of two Majorana fermions (MFs) formed at the ends of a topological superconducting wire. We employ the numerical renormalization group technique to obtain the thermoelectrical conductance LL as well as the electrical conductance GG when the background temperature TT and the dot gate are tuned. We distinguish two transport regimes in which LL displays different features: the weak- (Γm<TK)(\Gamma_{m} < T_{K}) and strong-coupling (Γm>TK)(\Gamma_{m} > T_{K}) regimes, where Γm\Gamma_{m} and TKT_{K} are the Majorana-dot coupling and the Kondo temperature, respectively. For an ideal (infinitely long) nanowire where the Majorana end states do not overlap (ϵm=0)(\epsilon_{m} = 0), the thermoelectrical conductance LL in the weak-coupling regime exhibits a peak at TΓmT \sim \Gamma_{m}. This peak is ascribed to the anti-Fano resonance between the asymmetric Kondo resonance and the zero-energy MF mode. Interestingly, in the strong-coupling regime, the Kondo-induced peak in LL is shifted due to the MF-induced Zeeman splitting in the dot. For finite but small ϵm>0\epsilon_{m} > 0, the interference between two MFs restores the Kondo effect in the dot in a smaller energy scale Γm\Gamma^{\prime}_{m} and gives rise to an additional peak in LL at TΓmT \sim \Gamma^{\prime}_{m}, whose sign is opposite to that at TΓmT\sim\Gamma_{m}. In the strong-coupling regime this additional peak can cause a non-monotonic behavior of LL with respect to the dot gate. Finally, we examine the case in which an ordinary spin-polarized fermion is coupled to the dot and identify the fingerprint of MFs by comparing two cases.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1408.5053,
  title  = {Thermoelectric effect in the Kondo dot side-coupled to a Majorana fermion},
  author = {Heunghwan Khim and Rosa Lopez and Jong Soo Lim and Minchul Lee},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1408.5053},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

10 pages, 8 figures