Many-terminal Majorana island: from Topological to Multi-Channel Kondo Model

TL;DR

This paper explores the behavior of Majorana islands coupled to electronic reservoirs, revealing a mapping to multi-channel Kondo models and identifying phase transitions influenced by electron interactions.

Contribution

It provides an exact mapping of Majorana island coupling to multi-channel Kondo effects and analyzes the impact of interactions on quantum phase transitions.

Findings

Exact mapping to multi-channel Kondo effect at charge degeneracy points

Interaction parameter K influences the fixed point and conductance

Phase transition occurs for more than four leads depending on K

Abstract

We study Kondo screening obtained by coupling Majorana bound states, located on a topological superconducting island, to interacting electronic reservoirs. At the charge degeneracy points of the island, we formulate an exact mapping onto the spin-$1/2$ multi-channel Kondo effect. The coupling to Majorana fermions transforms the tunneling terms into effective fermionic bilinear contributions with a Luttinger parameter $K$ in the leads that is effectively doubled. For strong interaction, $K=1/2$, the intermediate fixed point of the standard multi-channel Kondo model is exactly recovered. It evolves with $K$ and connects to strong coupling in non-interacting case $K=1$, with maximum conductance between the leads and robustness against channel asymmetries similarly to the topological Kondo effect. For a number of leads above four, there exists a window of Luttinger parameters in which a quantum phase transition can occur between the strong coupling topological Kondo state and the partially conducting multi-channel Kondo state.