Abstract
The anomalous proximity effect in dirty superconducting junctions is one of most striking phenomena highlighting the profound nature of Majorana bound states and odd-frequency Cooper pairs in topological superconductors. Motivated by the recent experimental realization of planar topological Josephson junctions, we describe the anomalous proximity effect in a superconductor/semiconductor hybrid, where an additional dirty normal-metal segment is extended from a topological Josephson junction. The topological phase transition in the topological Josephson junction is accompanied by a drastic change in the low-energy transport properties of the attached dirty normal-metal. The quantization of the zero-bias differential conductance, which appears only in the topologically nontrivial phase, is caused by the penetration of the Majorana bound states and odd-frequency Cooper pairs into a dirty normal-metal segment. As a consequence, we propose a practical experiment for observing the anomalous proximity effect.
Highlights
Majorana bound states (MBSs) in topological superconductors [1,2,3,4], which have opened a promising avenue for the realization of fault-tolerant quantum computations [5,6,7], have recently become a focus of intense research in condensed matter physics
Motivated by the recent experimental realization of planar topological Josephson junctions, we describe the anomalous proximity effect in a superconductor/semiconductor hybrid, where an additional dirty normal-metal segment is extended from a topological Josephson junction
We focus on a planar topological Josephson junction (TJJ) [13,14,15] realized in recent experiments [16,17,18]
Summary
The anomalous proximity effect in dirty superconducting junctions is one of most striking phenomena highlighting the profound nature of Majorana bound states and odd-frequency Cooper pairs in topological superconductors. The quantization of the zero-bias differential conductance, which appears only in the topologically nontrivial phase, is caused by the penetration of the Majorana bound states and odd-frequency Cooper pairs into a dirty normal-metal segment. The MBSs of a TJJ originate not from the band topology of the bulk states as is typically the case, but from the nontrivial band topology of the Andreev bound states appearing within the vicinity of the junction interface Owing to this peculiarity, it remains unclear whether a TJJ has an anomalous proximity effect. We propose a practical experiment for observing the anomalous proximity effect, which is a crucial subject in the physics of both MBSs and odd-frequency Cooper pairs.
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