Majorana fermions emerging from magnetic nanoparticles on a superconductor without spin-orbit coupling

By Ting-Pong Choy, J. Edge, A. Akhmerov, C. Beenakker. 2011

272 citations recorded by the source corpus.

There exists a variety of proposals to transform a conventional s-wave superconductor into a topological superconductor, supporting Majorana fermion mid-gap states. A necessary ingredient of these proposals is strong spin-orbit coupling. Here we propose an alternative system consisting of a one-dimensional chain of magnetic nanoparticles on a superconducting substrate. No spin-orbit coupling in the superconductor is needed. We calculate the topological quantum number of a chain of finite length, including the competing effects of disorder in the orientation of the magnetic moments and in the hopping energies, to identify the transition into the topologically nontrivial state (with Majorana fermions at the end points of the chain).

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Condensed Matter Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/712f43123309ff04341ba95654a950e6b0724d4c

Citations in the corpus

• Advances and challenges in single-molecule electron transport (2019, unknown): “The intense activity in this field is motivated by theoretical predictions of Majorana modes in spin chains (Choy et al., 2011; Nadj-Perge et al., 2013; Pientka et al., 2013).”
• High-resolution studies of the Majorana atomic chain platform (2016, unknown): “≥ 2exp {− 1 2 [√(y + a)2 + (√b2 − y2 + c) 2 + √(y − a)2 + (√b2 − y2 + c) 2 ]} (14)”