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Emergence of Majorana modes in cylindrical nanowires

Lim, Jong Soo; López, Rosa; Serra, Llorenç
Europhysics Letters 103, 37004 (1-6) (2013)

We present calculations of Majorana edge modes in cylindrical nanowires of a semi- conductor material with proximity-induced superconductivity. We consider a Rashba field along the transverse direction and an applied magnetic field in arbitrary orientation. Our analysis is based on exact numerical diagonalizations for the finite cylinder and on the complex band struc- ture for the semi-infinite one. Orbital effects are responsible for a strong anisotropy of the critical field for which the effective gap vanishes. Robust Majorana modes are induced by the parallel-field component and we find regimes with more than one Majorana mode on the same edge. Experi- mentally, they would manifest as a specific sequence of zero-bias conductances as a function of the magnetic field. In the finite cylinder, a degradation of the Majorana modes due to interference of the two edges leads to oscillating non-zero energies for large enough fields.