Honing in on a topological zero-bias conductance peak

Abstract

A popular signature of Majorana bound states in topological superconductors is the zero-energy conductance peak with a height of $2e^2/h$. However, a similar zero energy conductance peak with almost the same height can also arise due to non-topological reasons. Here we show that these trivial and topological zero energy conductance peaks can be distinguished via the zero energy local density of states and local magnetization density of states. We find that the zero-energy local density of states exhibits oscillations with a finite period for a trivial zero-bias conductance peak. In contrast, these oscillations disappear for the topological zero-bias conductance peak. On the other hand, zero energy local magnetization density of states shows a periodic oscillation for trivial zero-bias conductance peak, while for topological ZBCP, they vanish. Our results suggest that zero-energy local density of states and local magnetization density of states can be used as an experimental probe to distinguish trivial zero energy conductance peak from topological zero energy conductance peak.

24 pages, 9 figures, 1 Table

References in corpus (12)

• Signatures of Majorana fermions in hybrid superconductor-semiconductor nanowire devices
• Majorana bound states in a coupled quantum-dot hybrid-nanowire system
• Scaling of Majorana Zero-Bias Conductance Peaks
• Transport spectroscopy of NS nanowire junctions with Majorana fermions
• SNS junctions in nanowires with spin-orbit coupling: role of confinement and helicity on the sub-gap spectrum
• Odd-frequency superconducting pairing and subgap density of states at the edge of a two-dimensional topological insulator without magnetism
• Plateau regions for zero-bias peaks within 5% of the quantized conductance value $2e^2/h$
• Quantum-Dot Parity Effects in Trivial and Topological Josephson Junctions
• Majorana-like Coulomb spectroscopy in the absence of zero bias peaks
• Entanglement-induced electron coherence in a mesoscopic ring with two magnetic impurities
• Conductance interference in a superconducting Coulomb blockaded Majorana ring
• Spectroscopic Visualization of a Robust Electronic Response of Semiconducting Nanowires to Deposition of Superconducting Islands

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Identifying trivial and Majorana zero-energy modes using the Majorana polarization
• Interplay between Majorana and Shiba states in a minimal Kitaev chain coupled to a superconductor
• Probing the dichotomy between Yu-Shiba-Rusinov and Majorana bound states via conductance, quantum noise and ${\Delta }_T$ noise