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 investigate the possibility of realizing a topological state in the impurity band formed by a chain of classical spins embedded in a two-dimensional singlet superconductor with Rashba spinorbit coupling. In contrast to similar proposals which require a helical spin texture of the impurity spins for a nontrivial topology, here we show that spin-flip correlations due to the spin-orbit coupling in the superconductor produces a topological state for ferromagnetic alignment of the impurity spins. From the Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations we derive an effective tight-binding model for the subgap states which resembles a spinless superconductor with long-range hopping and pairing terms. We evaluate the topological invariant, and show that a topologically non-trivial state is generically present in this model.

Majorana fermion (MF) excitations in solid state system have non-Abelian statistics which is essential for topological quantum computation. Previous proposals to realize MF, however, generally requires fine-tuning of parameters. Here we explore a platform which avoids the fine-tuning problem, namely a ferromagnetic chain deposited on the surface of a spin-orbit coupled s-wave superconductor. We show that it generically supports zero-energy topological MF excitations near the two ends of the chain with minimal fine-tuning. Depending on the strength of the ferromagnetic moment in the chain, the number of MFs at each end, n, can be either one or two, and should be revealed by a robust zero-bias peak (ZBP) of height 2 ne2/h in scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) measurements which would show strong (weak) signals at the ends (middle) of the chain. The role of an approximate chiral symmetry which gives an integer topological invariant to the system is discussed.

Motivated by the proposed topological state in Cu x Bi 2 Se 3 , we study the possibility of phonon-mediated odd-parity superconductivity in spin-orbit coupled systems with time-reversal and inversion symmetry. For such systems, we show that, in general, pure electron-phonon coupling can never lead to a triplet state with a higher critical temperature than the leading singlet state. The Coulomb pseudopotential, which is the repulsive part of the electron-electron interaction and is typically small in weakly correlated systems, is therefore critical to stabilizing the triplet state. We introduce a chirality quantum number, which identifies the electron-phonon vertex interactions that are most favorable to the triplet channel as those that conserve chirality. Applying these results to Cu x Bi 2 Se 3 , we find that a phonon-mediated odd-parity state may be realized in the presence of weak electronic correlations if the chirality-preserving electron-phonon vertices are much stronger than the chirality-flipping vertices.

We investigate effects of ordinary nonmagnetic disorder in the bulk of a superconductor on magnetic adatom-induced Shiba states and on the proximity-induced superconductivity in a nanowire tunnel-coupled to the bulk superconductor. Within the formalism of self-consistent Born approximation we show that, contrary to the widespread belief, the proximity-induced topological superconductivity can be adversely affected by the bulk superconducting disorder even in the absence of any disorder in the nanowire (or the superconductor-nanowire interface) when the proximity tunnel-coupling is strong. In particular, bulk disorder can effectively randomize the Shiba state energies. In the case of a proximate semiconductor nanowire, we numerically compute the dependence of the effective disorder and pairing gap induced on the wire as a function of the semiconductorsuperconductor tunnel coupling. We find that the scaling exponent of the induced disorder with respect to coupling is always larger than that of the induced gap, implying that at weak coupling, the proximity induced pairing gap dominates whereas at strong coupling the induced disorder dominates. These findings bring out the importance of improving the quality of the bulk superconductor itself (in addition to the quality of the nanowire and the interface) in the experimental search for solid state Majorana fermions in proximity-coupled hybrid structures and, in particular, points out the pitfall of pursuing strong coupling between the semiconductor and the superconductor in a goal toward having a large proximity gap. In particular, our work establishes that the bulk superconductor in strongly-coupled hybrid systems for Majorana studies must be in the ultra-clean limit, since otherwise the bulk disorder is likely to completely suppress all induced topological superconductivity effect.

We present composite pulse sequences that perform fault-tolerant two-qubit gate operations on exchange-only quantum-dot spin qubits in various experimentally relevant geometries. We show how to perform dynamically corrected two-qubit gates in exchange-only systems with the leading hyperfine error term canceled. These pulse sequences are constructed to conform to the realistic experimental constraint of strictly non-negative couplings. We establish that our proposed pulse sequences lead to several orders of magnitude improvement in the gate fidelity compared with their uncorrected counterparts. Together with single-qubit dynamically corrected gates, our results enable noise-resistant universal quantum operations with exchange-only qubits.of the square bracket indicates that these three steps are repeated six times to form the entire sequence. An alternative way of performing the permutation is shown in the right diagram of Fig. 2(a). J J J J

In this work, we theoretically construct exact mappings of many-particle bosonic systems onto quantum rotor models. In particular, we analyze the rotor representation of spinor Bose-Einstein condensates. In a previous work [1] it was shown that there is an exact mapping of a spin-one condensate of fixed particle number with quadratic Zeeman interaction onto a quantum rotor model. Since the rotor model has an unbounded spectrum from above, it has many more eigenstates than the original bosonic model. Here we show that for each subset of states with fixed spin Fz, the physical rotor eigenstates are always those with lowest energy. We classify three distinct physical limits of the rotor model: the Rabi, Josephson, and Fock regimes. The last regime corresponds to a fragmented condensate and is thus not captured by the Bogoliubov theory. We next consider the semiclassical limit of the rotor problem and make connections with the quantum wave functions through use of the Husimi distribution function. Finally, we describe how to extend the analysis to higher-spin systems and derive a rotor model for the spin-two condensate. Theoretical details of the rotor mapping are also provided here.

We consider recent experiments on wide superconductor-quantum spin Hall insulator (QSHI)superconductor Josephson junctions, which have shown preliminary evidence of proximity-induced superconductivity at the edge-modes of the QSHI system based on an approximate analysis of the observed Fraunhofer spectra of the Josephson critical current as a function of the applied magnetic field. Using a completely independent exact numerical method involving a non-linear constrained numerical optimization, we calculate the supercurrent profiles, comparing our results quantitatively with the experimental Fraunhofer patterns in both HgCdTe and InAs-GaSb based QSHI Josephson junctions. Our results show good qualitative agreement with the experiments, verifying that the current distribution in the 2D sample indeed has peaks at the sample edges when the system is in the QSHI phase, thus supporting the interpretation that superconductivity has indeed been induced in the QSHI edge-modes. On the other hand, our numerical work clearly demonstrates that it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to obtain detailed quantitative information about the super-current distribution just from the analysis of the Josephson Fraunhofer spectra, and, therefore, conclusions regarding the precise width of the edge modes or their topological nature are most likely premature at this stage.