Abstract
We show that a chain of nonmagnetic impurities deposited on a fully gapped two- or three-dimensional superconductor can become a topological one-dimensional superconductor with protected Majorana bound states at its end. A prerequisite is that the pairing potential of the underlying superconductor breaks the spin-rotation symmetry, as it is generically the case in systems with strong spin-orbit coupling. We illustrate this mechanism for a spinless triplet-superconductor (px+ipy) and a time-reversal symmetric Rashba superconductor with a mixture of singlet and triplet pairing. For the latter, we show that the impurity chain can be topologically nontrivial even if the underlying superconductor is topologically trivial.
Original language | English (US) |
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Article number | 094508 |
Journal | Physical Review B |
Volume | 93 |
Issue number | 9 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Mar 7 2016 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials
- Condensed Matter Physics