Majorana boundary modes in Josephson junctions arrays with gapless bulk excitations

Abstract

The search for Majorana bound states in solid-state physics has been limited to materials which display a gap in their bulk spectrum. We show that such unpaired states appear in certain quasi-one-dimensional Josephson junctions arrays with gapless bulk excitations. The bulk modes mediate a coupling between Majorana bound states via the Ruderman-Kittel-Yosida-Kasuya mechanism. As a consequence, the lowest energy doublet acquires a finite energy difference. For realistic set of parameters this energy splitting remains much smaller than the energy of the bulk eigenstates even for short chains of length $L\sim 10$.

5 pages

References in corpus (6)

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• Quantum Superinductor with Tunable Non-Linearity
• Protected Josephson Rhombi Chains
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• Quantum spins on star graphs and the Kondo model
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