Electrostatic effects and topological superconductivity in semiconductor-superconductor-magnetic insulator hybrid wires

Abstract

We investigate the impact of electrostatics on the proximity effect between a magnetic insulator and a semiconductor wire in semiconductor-superconductor-magnetic insulator hybrid structures. By performing self-consistent Schr$\ddot{\mathrm{o}}$dinger-Poisson calculations using an effective model of the hybrid system, we find that large effective Zeeman fields consistent with the emergence of topological superconductivity emerge within a large parameter window in wires with overlapping layers of magnetic insulator and superconductor, but not in non-overlapping structures. We show that this behavior is essentially the result of electrostatic effects determining the amplitude of the low-energy wave functions near the semiconductor-magnetic insulator interface.

8 pages, 5 figures

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Estimating disorder and its adverse effects in semiconductor Majorana nanowires
• Partially-separated Majorana modes in a disordered medium
• Electronic properties of InAs/EuS/Al hybrid nanowires
• Topological superconductivity in tripartite superconductor-ferromagnet-semiconductor nanowires
• Zero-bias conductance peaks at zero applied magnetic field due to stray fields from integrated micromagnets in hybrid nanowire quantum dots
• Electrostatics in semiconducting devices I : The Pure Electrostatics Self Consistent Approximation