Magnification of signatures of topological phase transition by quantum zero point motion

Abstract

In this letter we show that the zero-point motion of the vortex in superconducting doped topological insulators leads to significant changes in the electronic spectrum at the topological phase transition in this system. This topological phase transition is tuned by the doping level and the corresponding effects manifest in the density of states at energies which are of the order of the fluctuations frequency. This frequency might be much larger than the electronic energy gap in the spectrum generated by a stationary vortex. As a result the quantum zero-point motion can move the spectral signature of the topological vortex phase transition to energies which are well within the resolution of scanning tunneling microscopy. Moreover, the phenomena studied in this letter present novel effects of Magnus force on the vortex spectrum which are not present in the ordinary s-wave superconductors. Our results show that quantum zero point fluctuations can bring the fingerprints of topological phase transitions to more experimentally accessible grounds and point to the importance of study of quantum fluctuations in different candidates for realizing topological phase transitions.

11 pages (including the supplementary materials), 3 figures

References in corpus (8)

• Quantum Spin Hall Effect and Topological Phase Transition in HgTe Quantum Wells
• Superconducting proximity effect and Majorana fermions at the surface of a topological insulator
• Signatures of Majorana fermions in hybrid superconductor-semiconductor nanowire devices
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• Space-Time Geometry of Topological phases
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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Multiple signatures of topological transitions for interacting fermions in chain lattices
• Magnus-Induced Dynamics of Driven Skyrmions on a Quasi-One-Dimensional Periodic Substrate
• Effect of Zeeman coupling on the Majorana vortex modes in iron-based topological superconductors
• Topological strings linking with quasi-particle exchange in superconducting Dirac semimetals