Zeeman-field-induced topological phase transitions in triplet superconductors

Timo Hyart; Anthony R. Wright; Bernd Rosenow

doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.90.064507

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Zeeman-field-induced topological phase transitions in triplet superconductors

Timo Hyart, Anthony R. Wright, Bernd Rosenow

DOI 10.1103/PhysRevB.90.064507 · Physical Review B

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Abstract

We develop a general Ginzburg-Landau theory that describes the effect of a Zeeman field on the superconducting order parameter in two-dimensional triplet superconductors. Starting from Ginzburg-Landau theories that describe fully gapped time-reversal symmetric triplet superconductors, we show that the Zeeman field has dramatic effects on the topological properties of the superconductors. In particular, in the vicinity of a critical chemical potential separating two topologically distinct phases, it is possible to induce a phase transition to a topologically nontrivial phase which supports chiral edge modes. Moreover, for specific directions of the Zeeman field, we obtain nodal superconducting phases with an emerging chiral symmetry, and with Majorana flat bands at the edge. The Ginzburg-Landau theory is microscopically supported by a self-consistent mean-field theory of the doped Kitaev-Heisenberg model.