Majorana Zero Modes in Superconducting Proximity-coupled Magnetic Domain Wall

TL;DR

This paper models a magnetic domain wall coupled to an s-wave superconductor to realize and analyze Majorana zero modes, demonstrating their existence, localization, and tunability in a topological phase diagram.

Contribution

It introduces a simple, tunable model for Majorana zero modes in magnetic domain walls coupled to superconductors, linking to Kitaev's model and exploring topological phases.

Findings

Majorana zero modes are explicitly demonstrated in the model.

The topological phase diagram reveals extended nontrivial regimes.

System can be experimentally tuned between trivial and topological phases.

Abstract

We propose a simple model consisting of a magnetic domain wall proximity-coupled to an $s$-wave superconductor for realization of Majorana zero-energy modes. A spin-dependent gauge transformation translates the rotating magnetic profile through the domain wall to effective spin-orbit and Zeeman terms. The Hamiltonian breaks time reversal and chiral symmetries, while preserving particle-hole symmetry, placing itself into topological D class characterized by the $\mathbb{Z}_{2}$ topological invariant for quasi one-dimensional system. The low-energy sector of the model maps to the one isomorphic with Kitaev Hamiltonian. The existence and localization of Majorana zero modes in the nontrivial phase are demonstrated explicitly and we obtain the topological phase diagram with extended regime of nontrivial phase and surprising occurrence of a re-entrance phase transition. Our calculation shows that the system can be easily tuned between trivial and topological ground states and can be implemented experimentally to realize non-Abelian statistics.