Date of Award
12-2014
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Legacy Department
Physics
Committee Chair/Advisor
Dr. Sumanta Tewari
Committee Member
Dr. Catalina Marinescu
Committee Member
Dr. Murray Daw
Committee Member
Dr. Jian He
Abstract
Majorana fermions were first proposed in the context of high energy physics by Ettore Majorana in 1937, just before his mysterious disappearance. Now, over 70 years later, signatures of condensed matter ana-logues of Majorana fermions are finally appearing in low-dimensional superconductor-based heterostructures. In low-dimensional systems, these order parameter, defect-bound Majorana quasiparticles obey non-Abelian quantum statistics and can therefore be used as the building blocks of a topological quantum computer. In this thesis we will analyze the signatures associated with, and the robustness of, Majorana bound states in a variety of one-dimensional superconducting platforms. Our main result is the finding that spatially localized Majorana modes may coexist, without an induced energy splitting, in the presence of additional symmetries. The effects and robustness of Majorana bound states in the presence of timer-reversal, chiral and spatial sym-metries are analyzed in detail. Our results allow us to explain the unexpected robustness of a zero-bias signal in recent experiments purporting to observe Majorana excitations.
Recommended Citation
Dumitrescu, Eugen Florin, "Majorana Fermions in Chiral Topological Superconductors" (2014). All Dissertations. 1467.
https://open.clemson.edu/all_dissertations/1467