English

Two-dimensional topological superconductivity with antiferromagnetic insulators

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2018-07-19 v2 Superconductivity

Abstract

Two-dimensional topological superconductivity has attracted great interest due to the emergence of Majorana modes bound to vortices and propagating along edges. However, due to its rare appearance in natural compounds, experimental realizations rely on a delicate artificial engineering involving materials with helical states, magnetic fields and conventional superconductors. Here we introduce an alternative path using a class of three-dimensional antiferromagnet to engineer a two- dimensional topological superconductor. Our proposal exploits the appearance of solitonic states at the interface between a topologically trivial antiferromagnet and a conventional superconductor, which realize a topological superconducting phase when their spectrum is gapped by intrinsic spin- orbit coupling. We show that these interfacial states do not require fine-tuning, but are protected by asymptotic boundary conditions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1803.01781,
  title  = {Two-dimensional topological superconductivity with antiferromagnetic insulators},
  author = {J. L. Lado and M. Sigrist},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1803.01781},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

11 pages, 9 figures, main and supplemental

R2 v1 2026-06-23T00:42:41.106Z