Quantized Spin Pumping in Topological Ferromagnetic-Superconducting Nanowires

  • V. Fernández Becerra*
  • , Mircea Trif
  • , Timo Hyart
  • *Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

7 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Semiconducting nanowires with strong spin-orbit coupling in the presence of induced superconductivity and ferromagnetism can support Majorana zero modes. We study the pumping due to the precession of the magnetization in single-subband nanowires and show that spin pumping is robustly quantized when the hybrid nanowire is in the topologically nontrivial phase, whereas charge pumping is not quantized. Moreover, there exists one-to-one correspondence between the quantized conductance, entropy change and spin pumping in long topologically nontrivial nanowires but these observables are uncorrelated in the case of accidental zero-energy Andreev bound states in the trivial phase. Thus, we conclude that observation of correlated and quantized peaks in the conductance, entropy change and spin pumping would provide strong evidence of Majorana zero modes, and we elaborate how topological Majorana zero modes can be distinguished from quasi-Majorana modes potentially created by a smooth tunnel barrier at the lead-nanowire interface. Finally, we discuss peculiar interference effects affecting the spin pumping in short nanowires at very low energies.

Original languageEnglish
Article number237002
JournalPhysical Review Letters
Volume130
Issue number23
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 9 Jun 2023
MoE publication typeA1 Journal article-refereed

Funding

The work is supported by the Foundation for Polish Science through the IRA Programme co-financed by EU within SG OP and the Academy of Finland Project No. 331094. We acknowledge the computational resources provided by the Aalto Science-IT project and the access to the computing facilities of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling (ICM), University of Warsaw, under Grant No. G89-1264.

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