Signatures of Majorana fermions in hybrid normal-superconducting rings

Abstract

We investigate persistent currents in metallic rings interrupted by a Coulomb blockaded topological superconducting segment. We show that the presence of Majorana bound states in the superconductor is reflected in the emergence of an h/e harmonics in the persistent current, whose sign is determined by the fermion parity of the superconductor. The Majorana bound states further render the current finite at zero flux, nevertheless the resulting peculiar symmetry of the persistent current is compatible with a free energy that is even in time-reversal symmetry breaking fields. These unique features of the persistent currents are robust against disorder and provide unambiguous signatures of the presence of Majorana fermions.

5 pages, 3 figures

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Cited by in corpus (11)

• Robust Transport Signatures of Topological Superconductivity in Topological Insulator Nanowires
• Multiple signatures of topological transitions for interacting fermions in chain lattices
• General framework for transport in spin-orbit-coupled superconducting heterostructures: Nonuniform spin-orbit coupling and spin-orbit-active interfaces
• Transfer matrix approach to the persistent current in hybrid normal-superconducting rings
• Electron waiting times for the mesoscopic capacitor
• Disorder-induced topological transitions in multichannel Majorana wires
• Fano effect in Aharonov-Bohm ring with topologically superconducting bridge
• Probing Majorana zero modes by measuring transport through an interacting magnetic impurity
• Entanglement and Disordered-Enhanced Topological Phase in the Kitaev Chain
• Floquet Majorana Fermions in superconducting quantum dots
• Disorder effects in planar semiconductor-superconductor structures: Majorana wires versus Josephson junctions