There exists a variety of proposals to transform a conventional s-wave superconductor into a topological superconductor, supporting Majorana fermion midgap states. A necessary ingredient of these proposals is strong spin-orbit coupling. Here we propose an alternative system consisting of a one-dimensional chain of magnetic nanoparticles on a superconducting substrate. No spin-orbit coupling in the superconductor is needed. We calculate the topological quantum number of a chain of finite length, including the competing effects of disorder in the orientation of the magnetic moments and in the hopping energies, to identify the transition into the topologically nontrivial state (with Majorana fermions at the end points of the chain).

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We define a class of insulators with gapless surface states protected from localization due to the statistical properties of a disordered ensemble, namely, due to the ensemble's invariance under a certain symmetry. We show that these insulators are topological, and are protected by a Z 2 invariant. Finally, we prove that every topological insulator gives rise to an infinite number of classes of statistical topological insulators in higher dimensions. Our conclusions are confirmed by numerical simulations.

We construct a periodically time-dependent Hamiltonian with a phase transition in the quantum Hall universality class. One spatial dimension can be eliminated by introducing a second incommensurate driving frequency, so that we can study the quantum Hall effect in a one-dimensional (1D) system. This reduction to 1D is very efficient computationally and would make it possible to perform experiments on the 2D quantum Hall effect using cold atoms in a 1D optical lattice.