Unconventional topological phase transitions in helical Shiba chains

Falko Pientka, Leonid I. Glazman, Felix von Oppen
2014 Physical Review B  
Chains of magnetic impurities placed on a superconducting substrate and forming helical spin order provide a promising venue for realizing a topological superconducting phase. An effective tight-binding description of such helical Shiba chains involves long-range (power-law) hopping and pairing amplitudes which induce an unconventional topological critical point. At the critical point, we find exponentially localized Majorana bound states with a short localization length unrelated to a
more » ... al gap. Away from the critical point, this exponential decay develops a power-law tail. Our analytical results have encouraging implications for experiment.
doi:10.1103/physrevb.89.180505 fatcat:uvfjydf3eze3lg7sh66lgneujq