Influence of the Majorana nonlocality on the supercurrent

We study the equilibrium Josephson current between an s-wave superconductor and a topological superconducting nanowire with Majorana bound states (MBS) at its ends. Within a low-energy model, we show analytically that the nonlocality of the MBS allows for a finite supercurrent to flow that otherwise...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Physical review. B 2018-12, Vol.98 (23), p.1, Article 235301
Main Authors: Schuray, Alexander, Yeyati, Alfredo Levy, Recher, Patrik
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Critical current (superconductivity)
Feature extraction
Mathematical models
Nanowires
Wave functions
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Summary:We study the equilibrium Josephson current between an s-wave superconductor and a topological superconducting nanowire with Majorana bound states (MBS) at its ends. Within a low-energy model, we show analytically that the nonlocality of the MBS allows for a finite supercurrent to flow that otherwise would vanish. In particular, we find the critical current to be a function of the difference in the spin-canting angles of the Majorana wave functions at the location of the tunnel contact. We complement our analytical calculations by numerically solving the full tight-binding model and show how to extract the main features of the low-energy model from the critical current using available experimental techniques.
ISSN:2469-9950
2469-9969
DOI:10.1103/PhysRevB.98.235301