Majorana fermions in semiconductor nanostructures with two wires connected through a ring

Abstract

We investigate the Majorana fermions in a semiconductor nanostructure with two wires connected through a ring. The nanostructure is mirror symmetric and in the proximity of a superconductor. The Rashba spin–orbit coupling and a magnetic field parallel to the wires or perpendicular to the ring are included. Moreover, a magnetic flux is applied through the center of the ring, which makes the phase difference of the superconducting order parameters in the two wires being zero or π due to the fluxoid quantization and the thermodynamic equilibrium of the supercurrent in the superconducting ring. If the phase difference is π, two Majorana modes are shown to appear around the ring without interacting with each other. In contrast, if the phase difference is zero, these Majorana modes disappear and the states localized around the ring have finite energies. These states can be detected via the conductance measurement by connecting two normal leads to the wires and a third one directly to the ring. It is shown in the bias dependence of the differential conductance from one of the leads connected to the wire to the one connected directly to the ring that the tunnelings through the Majorana modes (i.e., in the case with π phase difference) leads to two peaks very close to the zero bias, while the tunneling through the states with finite energies (i.e., in the case with zero phase difference) leads to peaks far away from the zero bias if the ring radius is small. This difference for the cases with and without the Majorana modes in small ring radius is distinct and hence can be used to identify the Majorana modes.