Electronic structure of full-shell InAs/Al hybrid semiconductor-superconductor nanowires: Spin-orbit coupling and topological phase space

Abstract

We study the electronic structure of full-shell superconductor-semiconductor nanowires, which have recently been proposed for creating Majorana zero modes, using an eight-band $\vec{k}\cdot \vec{p}$ model within a fully self-consistent Schrödinger-Poisson scheme. We find that the spin-orbit coupling induced by the intrinsic radial electric field is generically weak for sub-bands with their minimum near the Fermi energy. Furthermore, we show that the chemical potential windows consistent with the emergence of a topological phase are small and sparse and can only be reached by fine tunning the diameter of the wire. These findings suggest that the parameter space consistent with the realization of a topological phase in full-shell InAs/Al nanowires is, at best, very narrow.

5 pages, 4 figures + Supplemental Material

References in corpus (11)

• Non-Abelian Anyons and Topological Quantum Computation
• Signatures of Majorana fermions in hybrid superconductor-semiconductor nanowire devices
• Majorana Fermions and a Topological Phase Transition in Semiconductor-Superconductor Heterostructures
• Evidence of Majorana fermions in an Al - InAs nanowire topological superconductor
• Observation of Majorana Fermions in a Nb-InSb Nanowire-Nb Hybrid Quantum Device
• Majorana bound states in a coupled quantum-dot hybrid-nanowire system
• Anomalous modulation of a zero bias peak in a hybrid nanowire-superconductor device
• Scaling of Majorana Zero-Bias Conductance Peaks
• A Majorana smoking gun for the superconductor-semiconductor hybrid topological system
• Ballistic superconductivity in semiconductor nanowires
• A comparison of atomistic and continuum theoretical approaches to determine electronic properties of GaN/AlN quantum dots

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Subband occupation in semiconductor-superconductor nanowires
• Multiple topological transitions driven by the interplay of normal scattering and Andreev scattering
• Anisotropy of the spin-orbit coupling driven by a magnetic field in InAs nanowires
• Absence of Majorana oscillations in finite-length full-shell hybrid nanowires
• Fluxoid valve effect in full-shell nanowire Josephson junctions
• Absence of Quasi-Majorana False Positives in Full-Shell Hybrid Nanowires
• Fluxoid solitons in superconducting tapered tubes and bottlenecks