Disorder-induced topological transitions in multichannel Majorana wires

Abstract

In this work, we investigate the effect of disorder on the topological properties of multichannel superconductor nanowires. While the standard expectation is that the spectral gap is closed and opened at transitions that change the topological index of the wire, we show that the closing and opening of a transport gap can also cause topological transitions, even in the presence of nonzero density of states across the transition. Such transport gaps induced by disorder can change the topological index, driving a topologically trivial wire into a nontrivial state or vice versa. We focus on the Rashba spin-orbit coupled semiconductor nanowires in proximity to a conventional superconductor, which is an experimentally relevant system, and obtain analytical formulas for topological transitions in these wires, valid for generic realizations of disorder. Full tight-binding simulations show excellent agreement with our analytical results without any fitting parameters.

Published version, 11 pages, 9 figures, RevTeX

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• How to measure the Majorana polarization of a topological planar Josephson junction
• Density of states, transport, and topology in disordered Majorana nanowires
• Dimerization-induced topological superconductivity in a Rashba nanowire
• Effect of impurities and disorder on the braiding dynamics of Majorana zero modes
• Entanglement and Disordered-Enhanced Topological Phase in the Kitaev Chain
• Disordered Majorana nanowires: Studying disorder without any disorder
• Random matrix theory for the robustness, quantization, and end-to-end correlation of zero-bias conductance peaks in a class D ensemble
• Fermion-parity switches of the ground state of Majorana billiards
• Topological phase diagram of the disordered 2XY model in presence of generalized Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya Interaction
• Disorder effects in planar semiconductor-superconductor structures: Majorana wires versus Josephson junctions
• Topological phases in the presence of disorder and longer-range couplings
• Quantum Scars and Caustics in Majorana Billiards
• Ballistic transport in 1D Rashba systems in the context of Majorana nanowires
• Majorana edge and end states in planar Josephson junctions
• Rashba spin-orbit coupling and artificially engineered topological superconductors