Physics – Condensed Matter – Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics
Scientific paper
2011-12-27
Physics
Condensed Matter
Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics
9 pages, 4 figures
Scientific paper
It has been predicted that superconducting junctions made with topological nanowires hosting Majorana fermions exhibit an exotic Josephson effect which, owing to fermionic parity conservation, is 4\pi-periodic in the superconducting phase difference. Finding an experimental setup with these unconventional properties poses, however, a serious challenge: for finite-length junctions, the equilibrium supercurrents are always 2\pi-periodic as anticrossings of states with the same parity are possible. Landau-Zener transitions, induced by a dc bias voltage, are a conceivable route to revealing the 4\pi-effect. However, inelastic processes are expected to induce parity-mixing quasiparticle poisoning and hence destroy the anomalous periodicity. We here demonstrate that this intuition may be wrong: the ac Josephson current retains its anomalous 4\pi-periodic components during long-lived transients in the topological phase. Remarkably, quasiparticle escape towards the contacts can induce a quantum Zeno effect which fixes the parity of the Majorana logical qubits and delays the decay of transients. Hence, transient spectral properties may be effectively used to detect Majorana states.
Aguado Ramon
Prada Elsa
San-Jose Pablo
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