Licentiate Thesis: Adding Majorinos to Superconductors

by Thomas Kvorning (Stockholm University, Department of Physics)

Wednesday 3 Sept 2014, 10:00 → 12:00 Europe/Stockholm

C5:1007

States of matter with quasi-particle excitations that exhibit anyonic statistics are of great theoretical interest, especially in those cases where the anyons are non-Abelian. Two of the most promising states that could support non-Abelian anyons are the ν=5/2 quantum Hall state and the two dimensional p-wave superconductor, and they can both be understood as p-wave paired states. The motivation for the present thesis is to get a better understanding of the theoretical description of p-wave paired states. In the accompanying paper we construct an effective field theory for the 2D spin-less p-wave paired superconductor that faithfully describes the topological properties of the bulk state, and also provides a model for the subgap states at vortex cores and edges. In particular it captures the topologically protected zero modes and has the correct ground state degeneracy on the torus. We also show that our effective field theory becomes a topological field theory in a well defined scaling limit and that the vortices have the expected non-Abelian braiding statistics.