Majorana-assisted nonlocal electron transport through a floating topological superconductor

Abstract

The nonlocal nature of the fermionic mode spanned by a pair of Majorana bound states in a one-dimensional topological superconductor has inspired many proposals aiming at demonstrating this property in transport. In particular, transport through the mode from a lead attached to the left bound state to a lead attached to the right will result in current cross-correlations. For ideal zero modes on a grounded superconductor, the cross-correlations are however completely suppressed in favor of purely local Andreev reflection. In order to obtain a non-vanishing cross-correlation, previous studies have required the presence of an additional global charging energy. Adding nonlocal terms in the form of a global charging energy to the Hamiltonian when testing the intrinsic nonlocality of the Majorana modes seems to be conceptually troublesome. Here, we show that a floating superconductor allows to observe nonlocal current correlations in the absence of charging energy. We show that the non-interacting and the Coulomb-blockade regime have the same peak conductance $e^2/h$ but different shot-noise power; while the shot noise is sub-Poissonian in the Coulomb-blockade regime in the large bias limit, Poissonian shot noise is generically obtained in the non-interacting case.

References in corpus (2)

• Observing Majorana Bound States in p-wave Superconductors Using Noise Measurements in Tunneling Experiments
• Testable signatures of quantum non-locality in a two-dimensional chiral p-wave superconductor

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• Role of dephasing on the conductance signatures of Majorana zero modes
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• Non-Kondo many-body physics in a Majorana-based Kondo type system
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• Interaction effects in superconductor/quantum spin Hall devices: universal transport signatures and fractional Coulomb blockade
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• Cross correlation mediated by distant Majorana zero modes with no overlap
• Cross-correlation mediated by Majorana island with finite charging energy