We theoretically consider the ubiquitous soft gap measured in the tunneling conductance of semiconductorsuperconductor hybrid structures, in which recently observed signatures of elusive Majorana bound states have created much excitement. We systematically study the effects of magnetic and non-magnetic disorder, temperature, dissipative Cooper pair breaking, and interface inhomogeneity, which could lead to a soft gap. We find that interface inhomogeneity with moderate dissipation is the only viable mechanism that is consistent with the experimental observations. Our work indicates that improving the quality of the superconductor-semiconductor interface should result in a harder induced gap.

We study the interplay between disorder and interaction in one-dimensional topological superconductors which carry localized Majorana zero-energy states. Using Abelian bosonization and the perturbative renormalization group approach, we obtain the renormalization group flow and the associated scaling dimensions of the parameters and identify the critical points of the low-energy theory. We predict a quantum phase transition from a topological superconducting phase to a nontopological localized phase, and obtain the phase boundary between these two phases as a function of the electron-electron interaction and the disorder strength in the nanowire. Based on an instanton analysis which incorporates the effect of disorder, we also identify a large regime of stability of the Majorana-carrying topological phase in the parameter space of the model.

In the experiment of the quantum mirage, confinement of surface states in an elliptical corral has been used to project the Kondo effect from one focus where a magnetic impurity was placed, to the other empty focus. The signature of the Kondo effect is seen as a Fano antiresonance in scanning tunneling spectroscopy. This experiment combines the many-body physics of the Kondo effect with the subtle effects of confinement. In this work we review the essential physics of the quantum mirage experiment, and present new calculations involving other geometries and more than one impurity in the corral, which should be relevant for other experiments that are being made, and to discern the relative importance of the hybridization of the impurity with surface (V s ) and bulk (V b ) states. The intensity of the mirage imposes a lower bound to V s /V b which we estimate. Our emphasis is on the main physical ingredients of the phenomenon and the many-body aspects, like the dependence of the observed differential conductance with geometry, which cannot be calculated with alternative one-body theories. The system is described with an Anderson impurity model solved using complementary approaches: perturbation theory in the Coulomb repulsion U , slave bosons in mean field and exact 1 diagonalization plus embedding.

Topological Kondo insulators are strongly correlated materials where itinerant electrons hybridize with localized spins, giving rise to a topologically nontrivial band structure. Here, we use nonperturbative bosonization and renormalization-group techniques to study theoretically a one-dimensional topological Kondo insulator, described as a Kondo-Heisenberg model, where the Heisenberg spin-1=2 chain is coupled to a Hubbard chain through a Kondo exchange interaction in the p-wave channel (i.e., a strongly correlated version of the prototypical Tamm-Schockley model). We derive and solve renormalization-group equations at two-loop order in the Kondo parameter, and find that, at half filling, the charge degrees of freedom in the Hubbard chain acquire a Mott gap, even in the case of a noninteracting conduction band (Hubbard parameter U ¼ 0). Furthermore, at low enough temperatures, the system maps onto a spin-1=2 ladder with local ferromagnetic interactions along the rungs, effectively locking the spin degrees of freedom into a spin-1 chain with frozen charge degrees of freedom. This structure behaves as a spin-1 Haldane chain, a prototypical interacting topological spin model, and features two magnetic spin-1=2 end states for chains with open boundary conditions. Our analysis allows us to derive an insightful connection between topological Kondo insulators in one spatial dimension and the well-known physics of the Haldane chain, showing that the ground state of the former is qualitatively different from the predictions of the naive mean-field theory.

Recent interesting experiments used scanning tunneling microscopy to study systems involving Kondo impurities in quantum corrals assembled on Cu or noble metal surfaces. The solution of the two-dimensional one-particle Schrödinger equation in a hard wall corral without impurity is useful to predict the conditions under which the Kondo effect can be projected to a remote location (the quantum mirage). To model a soft circular corral, we solve this equation under the potential W δ(r − r0), where r is the distance to the center of the corral and r0 its radius. We expand the Green's function of electron surface states G 0 s for r < r0 as a discrete sum of contributions from single poles at energies ǫi − iδi. The imaginary part δi is the half-width of the resonance produced by the soft confining potential, and turns out to be a simple increasing function of ǫi. In presence of an impurity, we solve the Anderson model at arbitrary temperatures using the resulting expression for G 0 s and perturbation theory up to second order in the Coulomb repulsion U . We calculate the resulting change in the differential conductance ∆dI/dV as a function of voltage and space, in circular and elliptical corrals, for different conditions, including those corresponding to recent experiments. The main features are reproduced. The role of the direct hybridization between impurity and bulk, the confinement potential, the size of the corral and temperature on the intensity of the mirage are analyzed. We also calculate spin-spin correlation functions.

We propose a simple approach to study the conductance through an array of $N$ interacting quantum dots, weakly coupled to metallic leads. Using a mapping to an effective site which describes the low-lying excitations and a slave-boson representation in the saddle-point approximation, we calculated the conductance through the system. Explicit results are presented for N=1 and N=3: a linear array and an isosceles triangle. For N=1 in the Kondo limit, the results are in very good agreement with previous results obtained with numerical renormalization group (NRG). In the case of the linear trimer for odd $N$, when the parameters are such that electron-hole symmetry is induced, we obtain perfect conductance $G_0=2e^2/h$. The validity of the approach is discussed in detail.Comment: to appear in Phys. Rev.

We study the conductance through a ring described by the Hubbard model (such as an array of quantum dots), threaded by a magnetic flux and subject to Rashba spin-orbit coupling (SOC). We develop a formalism that is able to describe the interference effects as well as the Kondo effect when the number of electrons in the ring is odd. In the Kondo regime, the SOC reduces the conductance from the unitary limit, and, in combination with the magnetic flux, the device acts as a spin polarizer.

We study the spectral density of electrons ρ dσ (ω) in an interacting quantum dot (QD) with a hybridization λ to a non-interacting QD, which in turn is coupled to a non-interacting conduction band. The system corresponds to an impurity Anderson model in which the conduction band has a Lorentzian density of states of width ∆2. We solved the model using perturbation theory in the Coulomb repulsion U (PTU) up to second order and a slave-boson mean-field approximation (SBMFA). The PTU works surprisingly well near the exactly solvable limit ∆2 −→ 0. For fixed U and large enough λ or small enough ∆2, the Kondo peak in ρ dσ (ω) splits into two peaks. This splitting can be understood in terms of weakly interacting quasiparticles. Before the splitting takes place the universal properties of the model in the Kondo regime are lost. Using the SBMFA, simple analytical expressions for the occurrence of split peaks are obtained. For small or moderate ∆2, the side bands of ρ dσ (ω) have the form of narrow resonances, that were missed in previous studies using the numerical renormalization group. This technique also has shortcomings for describing properly the split Kondo peaks. As the temperature is increased, the intensity of the split Kondo peaks decreases, but it is not completely suppressed at high temperatures.