Weakly coupled Majorana wire arrays under tilted magnetic fields

Abstract

An array of Rashba-coupled semiconducting nanowires lying in proximity to an s-wave superconducting substrate, with weak inter-wire coupling, in the presence of an external magnetic field shows even–odd effect in the differential conductance over a chosen parameter space. Such an effect is a direct consequence of end Majoranas in each nanowire hybridizing into bonding and anti-bonding states. In the present work, we study in detail the impact of tilting of external magnetic field on the differential conductance of an array of both uncoupled and weakly coupled wires. The phase diagram evolution with various control parameters including the tilt angle of the magnetic field has also been presented. From detailed analysis of the field-angle dependence of the odd–even effect, and the evolution of the same over a large parameter space we summarize that the results can be used to exploit magnetic-field angle in an array of Rashba-coupled semiconducting nanowires on a superconducting substrate as an important tuning parameter to investigate zero-bias conductance peak arising from Majorana edge modes vis-a-vis that arising from a non-topological origin.