Proximity effect at the superconductor–topological insulator interface

By T. Stanescu, J. Sau, R. Lutchyn. 2010

151 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the excitation spectrum of a topological insulator in contact with an s-wave superconductor, starting from a microscopic model, and develop an effective low-energy model for the proximity effect. In the vicinity of the Dirac cone vertex, the effective model describing the states localized at the interface is well approximated by a model of Dirac electrons experiencing superconducting s-wave pairing. Away from the cone vertex, the induced pairing potential develops a p-wave component with a magnitude sensitive to the structure of the interface. Observing the induced s-wave superconductivity may require tuning the chemical potential close to the Dirac point. Furthermore, we find that the proximity of the superconductor leads to a significant renormalization of the original parameters of the effective model describing the surface states of a topological insulator.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fe276e08523d80e358651779e92bcd12ad755a9c

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Condensed Matter Physics

In Materials Chemistry

Citations in the corpus

Fractionalizing Majorana fermions: non-abelian statistics on the edges of abelian quantum Hall states (2012, background): “The search for non-Abelian systems originated from the Moore-Read theory [5] for the 1⁄4 5=2 fractional quantum Hall (FQH) state and went on to consider other quantumHall states [8,9], spin systems [10], p-wave superconductors [11–13], topological insulators coupled in proximity to superconductors [”