Topological superconducting phase in helical Shiba chains

By F. Pientka, L. Glazman, F. von Oppen. 2013

343 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recently, it has been suggested that topological superconductivity and Majorana end states can be realized in a chain of magnetic impurities on the surface of an s-wave superconductor when the magnetic moments form a spin helix as a result of the RKKY interaction mediated by the superconducting substrate. Here, we investigate this scenario theoretically by developing a tight-binding Bogoliubov-de Gennes description starting from the Shiba bound states induced by the individual magnetic impurities. While the resulting model Hamiltonian has similarities with the Kitaev model for one-dimensional spinless p-wave superconductors, there are also important differences, most notably the long-range nature of hopping and pairing as well as the complex hopping amplitudes. We use both analytical and numerical approaches to explore the consequences of these differences for the phase diagram and the localization properties of the Majorana end states when the Shiba chain is in a topological superconducting phase.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8aabaf11f5e58cfbe0c633351fe7345c44055732

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Condensed Matter Physics

Citations in the corpus

Long-range Ising and Kitaev models: phases, correlations and edge modes (2015, background): “In particular, Kitaev chains with non-local hopping and pairing may be realized in solid state architectures with so-called helical Shiba chains, made of magnetic impurities on an s-wave superconductor [28, 29].”
Advances and challenges in single-molecule electron transport (2019, positive): “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).”