Helical spin texture of surface states in topological superconductors

Abstract

Surface states of topological noncentrosymmetric superconductors exhibit intricate helical spin textures, i.e., the spin orientation of the surface quasiparticles is coupled to their momentum. Using quasiclassical theory, we study the spin polarization of the surface states as a function of the spin-orbit interaction and superconducting pairing symmetry. We focus on two- and three-dimensional fully gapped and nodal noncentrosymmetric superconductors. For the case of nodal systems, we show that the spin polarization of the topological flat bands is controlled by the spin polarization of the bulk normal states at the bounding gap nodes. We demonstrate that the zero-bias conductance in a magnetic tunnel junction can be used as an experimental test of the surface-state spin polarization.

18 pages, 6 figures

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Cited by in corpus (11)

• Topological surface states in nodal superconductors
• Inflated nodes and surface states in superconducting half-Heusler compounds
• Interaction-Induced Renormalization of Tunneling into Multiple Majorana End States of a Topological Superconducting Wire
• Helical Majorana surface states of strongly disordered topological superconductors with time-reversal symmetry
• Surface instability in nodal noncentrosymmetric superconductors
• Localization to delocalization transition in a double stranded helical geometry: Effects of conformation, transverse electric field and dynamics
• Interacting Majorana modes at surfaces of noncentrosymmetric superconductors
• Complete zero-energy flat bands of surface states in fully gapped chiral noncentrosymmetric superconductors
• Manipulation of Majorana wave packets at surfaces of nodal noncentrosymmetric superconductors
• Andreev bound states at boundaries of polarized 2D Fermi superfluids with s-wave pairing and spin-orbit coupling
• Majorana flat bands at structured surfaces of nodal noncentrosymmetric superconductors