Probing the chirality of 1D Majorana edge states around a 2D nanoflake in a superconductor

Abstract

The interplay between superconductivity, magnetic field and spin-orbit coupling can lead to the realization of non--trivial topological phases. Recent experiments have found signatures of such phases in magnetic nanoflakes formed by nanostructures coupled to a superconducting substrate. These heterostructures comprise a topologically non-trivial region surrounded by a trivial one due to the finite magnetic exchange field induced by the magnetic nanoflake. The analysis of the topological phase diagram of such a system shows that a similar phase separation occurs by tuning the chemical potential of the nanoflake. In this paper, we study such a possibility in detail, analyzing the spatial extent of the edge modes circulating around the nanoflake and discussing some practical implementations. We also show how the chirality of Majorana edge states can be probed using scanning tunneling spectroscopy with a double tip setup.

12 pages, 13 figures

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Cited by in corpus (8)

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• Coexistence of Antiferromagnetism and Superconductivity in Mn/Nb(110)
• Topological superconductivity in EuS/Au/superconductor heterostructures
• Inducing chiral superconductivity on honeycomb lattice systems
• Directly probing the chirality of Majorana edge states
• Angular momentum of vortex-core Majorana zero modes
• Topological in-gap chiral edge states in superconducting Haldane model with spin-orbit coupling
• Identification of the Majorana edge modes in tight-binding systems based on the Krylov method