Environmental Coulomb blockade of topological superconductor-normal metal junctions

Abstract

We study charge transport of a topological superconductor connected to different electromagnetic environments using a low-energy description where only the Majorana bound states in the superconductor are included. Extending earlier findings that found a crossover between perfect Andreev reflection with conductance 2e2/h and a regime with blocked transport when the resistance of the environment is larger than 2e2/h, we consider Majorana bound states coupled to metallic dots. In particular, we study two topological superconducting leads connected by a metallic quantum dot in both the weak-tunneling and strong-tunneling regimes. For weak tunneling, we project onto the most relevant charge states. For strong tunneling, we start from the Andreev fixed point and integrate out charge fluctuations, which gives an effective low-energy model for the nonperturbative gate-voltage-modulated cotunneling current. In both regimes and in contrast to cotunneling with normal leads, the conductance is temperature independent because of the resonant Andreev reflections, which are included to all orders.

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