Topological Superconductivity in Twisted Flakes of Nodal Superconductors

TL;DR

This paper investigates the topological properties of twisted bilayer nodal superconductors with finite thickness, revealing how layer number and twist angle influence the topological gap, Chern number, and observable effects like the thermal Hall coefficient.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of topological phases in twisted nodal superconductor flakes, highlighting the impact of thickness, twist angle, and current on their topological properties and transitions.

Findings

Chern number scales with layer number as ~O(N) at low current.

Thermal Hall coefficient remains independent of layer number at high temperatures.

Increasing bias current induces topological transitions with Chern number ~O(N^2).

Abstract

Twisted bilayers of nodal superconductors have been recently demonstrated to be a potential platform to realize two-dimensional topological superconductivity. Here we study the topological properties of twisted finite-thickness flakes of nodal superconductors under applied current, focusing on the case of a $N$-layer flake with a single twisted top layer. At low current bias and small twist angles, the average nodal topological gap is reduced with flake thickness as $\sim\mathcal{O}(\frac{1}{N})$, but the Chern number grows $\sim \mathcal{O}(N)$. As a result, we find the thermal Hall coefficient to be independent of $N$ at temperatures larger than the nodal gap. At larger twist angles, we demonstrate that the nodal gap in the density of states of the top layer is only weakly suppressed, allowing its detection in scanning tunneling microscopy experiments. These conclusions are demonstrated numerically in an atomic-scale tight-binding model and analytically through the model's continuum limit, finding excellent agreement between the two. Finally, we show that increasing the bias current leads to a sequence of topological transitions, where the Chern number increases like $\sim\mathcal{O}(N^2)$ beyond the additive effect of stacking $N$ layers. Our results show that twisted superconductor flakes are "$2.5$-dimensional" materials, allowing to realize new electronic properties due to synergy between two-dimensional layers extended to a finite thickness in a third dimension.