Ground-State Fermion Parity and Caloric Properties of a Superconducting Nanowire

Abstract

The ground-state structure and fermion parity have been determined for a semiconductor nano-wire with a strong Rashba spin–orbit interaction and proximity-induced superconductivity placed in an external magnetic field under periodic boundary conditions. Allowance for the open boundaries is shown to cause the topologically nontrivial parameter region to be partitioned into a set of subregions with a different ground-state fermionic parity. This peculiarity is related to the emergence of edge modes with nonmonotonically changing excitation energies in the system as its parameters change. At the quantum transition point, at which the ground-state fermionic parity changes, the edge-mode energy is zero. The magneto- and electrocaloric effects are shown to be effective characteristics that allow the series of quantum transitions in an open nanowire to be identified experimentally. These effects at low temperatures exhibit an anomalous behavior in the parameter region for which topologically stable Majorana modes are realized in long nanowires.