Category: List of Bases 2012 Throughout the year RESEARCH IN CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS 

Title:

Seminar on Disorder and strong electron correlations: "Majorana fermions and subgap states in spinless p-wave superconducting wires"

Start Time:

11:30

Location:

ICTP (Leonardo da Vinci Building Luigi Stasi Seminar Room)

Contact:

M. Poropat

Speaker(s):

Piet BROUWER (Freie Universitaet Berlin )

Description:

Spinless p-wave superconducting wires can be in a topological phase in which they harbor Majorana bound states at their ends. Although there are no known spinless p-wave superconductors in nature, several routes to the artificial creation of such systems have been proposed. In this talk, I will discuss how non-idealities in some of the proposed routes, such as potential disorder and deviations from a strict one-dimensional limit, affect the topological phase. In particular, I'll discuss how the topological phase can persist at weak disorder or for multichannel wires, although some of the signatures of the presence of Majorana fermions are obscured.