Majorana fermions in density modulated p-wave superconducting wires

Abstract

We study the p-wave superconducting wire with a periodically modulated chemical potential and show that the Majorana edge states are robust against the periodic modulation. We find that the critical amplitude of modulated potential, at which the Majorana edge fermions and topological phase disappear, strongly depends on the phase shifts. For some specific values of the phase shift, the critical amplitude tends to infinity. The existence of Majorana edge fermions in the open chain can be characterized by a topological $Z_2$ invariant of the bulk system, which can be applied to determine the phase boundary between the topologically trivial and nontrivial superconducting phases. We also demonstrate the existence of the zero-energy peak in the spectral function of the topological superconducting phase, which is only sensitive to the open boundary condition but robust against the disorder.

6 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (7)

• Non-Abelian Anyons and Topological Quantum Computation
• Superconducting proximity effect and Majorana fermions at the surface of a topological insulator
• Signatures of Majorana fermions in hybrid superconductor-semiconductor nanowire devices
• Majorana Fermions and a Topological Phase Transition in Semiconductor-Superconductor Heterostructures
• Multichannel Generalization of Kitaev's Majorana End States and a Practical Route to Realize Them in Thin Films
• Search for Majorana fermions in multiband semiconducting nanowires
• Majorana edge states in interacting one-dimensional systems

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Majorana Fermions and Odd-frequency Cooper Pairs in a Nano Wire
• Topological phase in a non-Hermitian PT symmetric system
• Generalized Aubry-André-Harper model with p-wave superconducting pairing
• Characterization of topological phases of modified dimerized Kitaev chain via edge correlation functions
• Exact solution to an interacting dimerized Kitaev model at symmetric point
• Dynamics of a quantum phase transition in the Aubry-André-Harper model with $p$-wave superconductivity
• Fano interference and a slight fluctuation of the Majorana hallmark
• Edge states, Majorana fermions and topological order in superconducting wires with generalized boundary conditions
• Polynomial description of inhomogeneous topological superconducting wires