Detecting Majorana fermions by use of superconductor-quantum Hall liquid junctions

¹ School of Physics and Engineering, Henan University of Science and Technology - Luoyang 471003, China
² National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures, Department of Physics, and Collaborative Innovation Center of Advanced Microstructures, Nanjing University - Nanjing 210093, China

Received: 9 March 2016
Accepted: 26 April 2016

Abstract

The point contact tunnel junctions between a one-dimensional topological superconductor and single-channel quantum Hall (QH) liquids are investigated theoretically with bosonization technology and renormalization group methods. For the integer QH liquid, the universal low-energy tunneling transport is governed by the perfect Andreev reflection fixed point with quantized zero-bias conductance , which can serve as a definitive fingerprint of the existence of a Majorana fermion. For the Laughlin fractional QH liquids, its transport is governed by the perfect normal reflection fixed point with vanishing zero-bias conductance and bias-dependent conductance . Our setup is within reach of the present experimental techniques.