Impurity-induced states in superconducting heterostructures

Abstract

Heterostructures allow the realization of electronic states that are difficult to obtain in isolated systems. Exemplary is the case of quasi-one-dimensional heterostructures formed by a superconductor and a semiconductor with spin-orbit coupling in which Majorana zero-energy modes can be realized. We study the effect of a single impurity on the spectrum of superconducting heterostructures. We find that the coupling between the superconductor and the semiconductor can strongly affect the impurity-induced states and may induce additional subgap bound states that are not present in isolated uniform superconductors. For the case of quasi-one-dimensional superconductor/semiconductor heterostructures, we obtain the conditions for which the low-energy impurity-induced bound states appear.

8 pages, 7 figures with a few minor changes

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• Recent progress on Majorana in semiconductor-superconductor heterostructures--Engineering and detection
• Topological superconductivity in nanowires proximate to a diffusive superconductor-magnetic insulator bilayer
• Proximity effect in PbTe-Pb hybrid nanowire Josephson junctions
• Suppressing Andreev bound state zero bias peaks using a strongly dissipative lead
• Universal conductance scaling of Andreev reflections using a dissipative probe
• Electronic structure of graphene-nanoribbons on hexagonal boron nitride
• Large Andreev bound state zero bias peaks in a weakly dissipative environment
• Electron correlation effects in superconducting nanowires in and out of equilibrium
• Reveal the non-local coherent nature from a dissipative Majorana teleportation
• Impurity-induced subgap states in superconductors with inhomogeneous pairing
• Theoretical proposal to obtain strong Majorana evidence from scanning tunneling spectroscopy of a vortex with a dissipative environment
• Topological phases in the presence of disorder and longer-range couplings
• Effects of the Vertices on the Topological Bound States in a Quasicrystalline Topological Insulator
• A unified numerical approach to semiconductor-superconductor heterostructures