scholarly journals Majorana Zero Modes in Ferromagnetic Wires without Spin-Orbit Coupling

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 44
Author(s):  
Giorgos Livanas ◽  
Nikolaos Vanas ◽  
Georgios Varelogiannis

We present a novel controllable platform for engineering Majorana zero modes. The platform consists of a ferromagnetic metallic wire placed among conventional superconductors, which are in proximity to ferromagnetic insulators. We demonstrate that Majorana zero modes emerge localised at the edges of the ferromagnetic wire, due to the interplay of the applied supercurrents and the induced by proximity exchange fields with conventional superconductivity. Our mechanism does not rely on the pairing of helical fermions by combining conventional superconductivity with spin-orbit coupling, but rather exploits the misalignment between the magnetization of the ferromagnetic insulators and that of the ferromagnetic wire.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabían Gonzalo Medina ◽  
Dunkan Martínez ◽  
Alvaro Díaz-Fernández ◽  
Francisco Domínguez-Adame ◽  
Luis Rosales ◽  
...  

Abstract The quest for Majorana zero modes in the laboratory is an active field of research in condensed matter physics. In this regard, there have been many theoretical proposals; however, their experimental detection remains elusive. In this article, we present a realistic setting by considering a quantum ring with Rashba spin-orbit coupling and threaded by a magnetic flux, in contact with a topological superconducting nanowire. We focus on spin-polarized persistent currents to assess the existence of Majorana zero modes. We find that the Rashba spin-orbit coupling allows for tuning the position of the zero modes and has sizable effects on spin-polarized persistent currents. Our results pave the way towards probing the existence of Majorana zero modes.


2017 ◽  
Vol 96 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Liang-Liang Wang ◽  
Ming Gong ◽  
W.-M. Liu

1999 ◽  
Vol 96 (6) ◽  
pp. 955-961 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. A. PAZYUK

1976 ◽  
Vol 37 (C7) ◽  
pp. C7-104-C7-104
Author(s):  
K. E. MAUSER ◽  
B. NIESERT ◽  
A. WINNACKER

2019 ◽  
Vol 116 (10) ◽  
pp. 4006-4011 ◽  
Author(s):  
H.-H. Kung ◽  
A. P. Goyal ◽  
D. L. Maslov ◽  
X. Wang ◽  
A. Lee ◽  
...  

The protected electron states at the boundaries or on the surfaces of topological insulators (TIs) have been the subject of intense theoretical and experimental investigations. Such states are enforced by very strong spin–orbit interaction in solids composed of heavy elements. Here, we study the composite particles—chiral excitons—formed by the Coulomb attraction between electrons and holes residing on the surface of an archetypical 3D TI,Bi2Se3. Photoluminescence (PL) emission arising due to recombination of excitons in conventional semiconductors is usually unpolarized because of scattering by phonons and other degrees of freedom during exciton thermalization. On the contrary, we observe almost perfectly polarization-preserving PL emission from chiral excitons. We demonstrate that the chiral excitons can be optically oriented with circularly polarized light in a broad range of excitation energies, even when the latter deviate from the (apparent) optical band gap by hundreds of millielectronvolts, and that the orientation remains preserved even at room temperature. Based on the dependences of the PL spectra on the energy and polarization of incident photons, we propose that chiral excitons are made from massive holes and massless (Dirac) electrons, both with chiral spin textures enforced by strong spin–orbit coupling. A theoretical model based on this proposal describes quantitatively the experimental observations. The optical orientation of composite particles, the chiral excitons, emerges as a general result of strong spin–orbit coupling in a 2D electron system. Our findings can potentially expand applications of TIs in photonics and optoelectronics.


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