Engineering of many-body Majorana states in a topological insulator/s-wave superconductor heterostructure

Abstract

We study a vortex chain in a thin film of a topological insulator with proximity-induced superconductivity---a promising platform to realize Majorana zero modes (MZMs)---by modeling it as a two-leg Majorana ladder. While each pair of MZMs hybridizes through vortex tunneling, we hereby show that MZMs can be stabilized on the ends of the ladder with the presence of tilted external magnetic field and four-Majorana interaction. Furthermore, a fruitful phase diagram is obtained by controlling the direction of magnetic field and the thickness of the sample. We reveal many-body Majorana states and interaction-induced topological phase transitions and also identify trivial-superconducting and commensurate/incommensurate charge-density-wave states in the phase diagram.

10 pages, 4 figures

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Cited by in corpus (3)

• Majorana zero modes and long range edge correlation in interacting Kitaev chains: analytic solutions and density-matrix-renormalization-group study
• Coexistence of Strong and Weak Majorana Zero Modes in Anisotropic XY Spin Chain with Second-Neighbor Interaction
• Brane order and quantum magnetism in modulated anisotropic ladders