Majorana bound states and non-local spin correlations in a quantum wire on an unconventional superconductor

TL;DR

This paper theoretically investigates Majorana bound states and non-local spin correlations in a quantum wire on an unconventional superconductor, revealing topological protections and control mechanisms via gate potentials.

Contribution

It introduces a model of a quantum wire on various unconventional superconductors, demonstrating the existence and stability of Majorana states and controllable non-local spin correlations.

Findings

Majorana bound states appear at both wire ends in all three superconductor classes.

Topological protection of states depends on the superconductor's symmetry class.

Non-local spin correlations can be controlled by a gate potential.

Abstract

We study theoretically the proximity effect of a one-dimensional metallic quantum wire (in the absence of spin-orbit interaction) lying on top of an unconventional superconductor. Three different material classes are considered as a substrate: (i) a chiral superconductor in class D with broken time-reversal symmetry; a class DIII superconductor (ii) with and (iii) without a nontrivial Z2 number. Interestingly, we find degenerate zero energy Majorana bound states at both ends of the wire for all three cases. They are unstable against spin-orbit interaction in case (i) while they are topologically protected by time-reversal symmetry in cases (ii) and (iii). Remarkably, we show that non-local spin correlations between the two ends of the wire can be simply controlled by a gate potential in our setup.