Long-range Kitaev Chains via Planar Josephson Junctions

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how a planar Josephson junction setup can be effectively modeled as a long-range Kitaev chain, enabling exploration of topological superconductivity with tunable couplings in solid state systems.

Contribution

It provides a novel mapping of a planar Josephson junction to a long-range Kitaev chain, showing tunability and robustness to disorder, thus broadening experimental avenues for topological superconductivity.

Findings

Mapping is robust to disorder.

Couplings can be tuned via experimental parameters.

Potential for exploring non-standard topological phases.

Abstract

We show how a recently proposed solid state Majorana platform comprising a planar Josephson junction proximitized to a 2D electron gas (2DEG) with Rashba spin-orbit coupling and Zeeman field can be viewed as an effectively one dimensional (1D) Kitaev chain with long-range pairing and hopping terms. We highlight how the couplings of the 1D system may be tuned by changing experimentally realistic parameters. We also show that the mapping is robust to disorder by computing the Clifford pseudospectrum index in real space for the long-range Kitaev chain across several topological phases. This mapping opens up the possibility of using current experimental setups to explore 1D topological superconductors with non-standard, and tunable couplings.