Majorana vortex-bound states in three-dimensional nodal noncentrosymmetric superconductors

Abstract

Noncentrosymmetric superconductors (NCSs), characterized by antisymmetric spin-orbit coupling and a mixture of spin-singlet and spin-triplet pairing components, are promising candidate materials for topological superconductivity. An important hallmark of topological superconductors is the existence of protected zero-energy states at surfaces or in vortex cores. Here we investigate Majorana vortex-bound states in three-dimensional nodal and fully gapped NCSs by combining analytical solutions of Bogoliubov–de Gennes (BdG) equations in the continuum with exact diagonalization of BdG Hamiltonians. We show that depending on the crystal point-group symmetries and the topological properties of the bulk Bogoliubov-quasiparticle wave functions, different types of zero-energy Majorana modes can appear inside the vortex core. We find that for nodal NCSs with tetragonal point group C4v the vortex states are dispersionless along the vortex line, forming one-dimensional Majorana flat bands, while for NCSs with D4 point-group symmetry the vortex modes are helical Majorana states with a linear dispersion along the vortex line. NCSs with monoclinic point group C2, on the other hand, do not exhibit any zero-energy vortex-bound states. We show that in the case of the C4v (D4) point group the stability of these Majorana zero modes is guaranteed by a combination of reflection (π rotation), time-reversal, and particle-hole symmetry. Considering continuous deformations of the quasiparticle spectrum in the presence of vortices, we show that the flat-band vortex-bound states of C4v point-group NCSs can be adiabatically connected to the dispersionless vortex-bound states of time-reversal symmetric Weyl superconductors. Experimental implications of our results for thermal transport and tunneling measurements are discussed.

Source-reported materials — not catalogue approval

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