Effects of electron scattering on the topological properties of nanowires: Majorana fermions from disorder and superlattices

We focus on inducing topological state from regular, or irregular scattering in (i) p-wave superconducting wires and (ii) Rashba wires proximity coupled to an s-wave superconductor. We find that contrary to common expectations the topological properties of both systems are fundamentally different: In p-wave wires, disorder generally has a detrimental effect on the topological order and the topological state is destroyed beyond a critical disorder strength. In contrast, in Rashba wires, which are relevant for recent experiments, disorder can {\it induce} topological order, reducing the need for quasiballistic samples to obtain Majorana fermions. Moreover, we find that the total phase space area of the topological state is conserved for long disordered Rashba wires, and can even be increased in an appropriately engineered superlattice potential.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figs, RevTe

Robust Helical Edge Transport in Quantum Spin Hall Quantum Wells

We show that burying of the Dirac point in semiconductor-based quantum-spin-Hall systems can generate unexpected robustness of edge states to magnetic fields. A detailed ${\bf k\cdot p}$ band-structure analysis reveals that InAs/GaSb and HgTe/CdTe quantum wells exhibit such buried Dirac points. By simulating transport in a disordered system described within an effective model, we further demonstrate that buried Dirac points yield nearly quantized edge conduction out to large magnetic fields, consistent with recent experiments.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figure

Phase-locked magnetoconductance oscillations as a probe of Majorana edge states

We calculate the Andreev conductance of a superconducting ring interrupted by a flux-biased Josephson junction, searching for electrical signatures of circulating edge states. Two-dimensional pair potentials of spin-singlet d-wave and spin-triplet p-wave symmetry support, respectively, (chiral) Dirac modes and (chiral or helical) Majorana modes. These produce h/e-periodic magnetoconductance oscillations of amplitude \simeq (e^{2}/h)N^{-1/2}, measured via an N-mode point contact at the inner or outer perimeter of the grounded ring. For Dirac modes the oscillations in the two contacts are independent, while for an unpaired Majorana mode they are phase locked by a topological phase transition at the Josephson junction.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures. New appendix on the gauge invariant discretization of the Bogoliubov-De Gennes equation. Accepted for publication in PR

Interfaces Within Graphene Nanoribbons

We study the conductance through two types of graphene nanostructures: nanoribbon junctions in which the width changes from wide to narrow, and curved nanoribbons. In the wide-narrow structures, substantial reflection occurs from the wide-narrow interface, in contrast to the behavior of the much studied electron gas waveguides. In the curved nanoribbons, the conductance is very sensitive to details such as whether regions of a semiconducting armchair nanoribbon are included in the curved structure -- such regions strongly suppress the conductance. Surprisingly, this suppression is not due to the band gap of the semiconducting nanoribbon, but is linked to the valley degree of freedom. Though we study these effects in the simplest contexts, they can be expected to occur for more complicated structures, and we show results for rings as well. We conclude that experience from electron gas waveguides does not carry over to graphene nanostructures. The interior interfaces causing extra scattering result from the extra effective degrees of freedom of the graphene structure, namely the valley and sublattice pseudospins.Comment: 19 pages, published version, several references added, small changes to conclusion

Strokes2Surface: Recovering Curve Networks From 4D Architectural Design Sketches

We present Strokes2Surface, an offline geometry reconstruction pipeline that recovers well-connected curve networks from imprecise 4D sketches to bridge concept design and digital modeling stages in architectural design. The input to our pipeline consists of 3D strokes' polyline vertices and their timestamps as the 4th dimension, along with additional metadata recorded throughout sketching. Inspired by architectural sketching practices, our pipeline combines a classifier and two clustering models to achieve its goal. First, with a set of extracted hand-engineered features from the sketch, the classifier recognizes the type of individual strokes between those depicting boundaries (Shape strokes) and those depicting enclosed areas (Scribble strokes). Next, the two clustering models parse strokes of each type into distinct groups, each representing an individual edge or face of the intended architectural object. Curve networks are then formed through topology recovery of consolidated Shape clusters and surfaced using Scribble clusters guiding the cycle discovery. Our evaluation is threefold: We confirm the usability of the Strokes2Surface pipeline in architectural design use cases via a user study, we validate our choice of features via statistical analysis and ablation studies on our collected dataset, and we compare our outputs against a range of reconstructions computed using alternative methods.Comment: 15 pages, 14 figure

One-loop surface tensions of (supersymmetric) kink domain walls from dimensional regularization

We consider domain walls obtained by embedding the 1+1-dimensional $\phi^4$-kink in higher dimensions. We show that a suitably adapted dimensional regularization method avoids the intricacies found in other regularization schemes in both supersymmetric and non-supersymmetric theories. This method allows us to calculate the one-loop quantum mass of kinks and surface tensions of kink domain walls in a very simple manner, yielding a compact d-dimensional formula which reproduces many of the previous results in the literature. Among the new results is the nontrivial one-loop correction to the surface tension of a 2+1 dimensional N=1 supersymmetric kink domain wall with chiral domain-wall fermions.Comment: 23 pages, LATeX; v2: 25 pages, 2 references added, extended discussion of renormalization schemes which dispels apparent contradiction with previous result

Wigner-Poisson statistics of topological transitions in a Josephson junction

The phase-dependent bound states (Andreev levels) of a Josephson junction can cross at the Fermi level, if the superconducting ground state switches between even and odd fermion parity. The level crossing is topologically protected, in the absence of time-reversal and spin-rotation symmetry, irrespective of whether the superconductor itself is topologically trivial or not. We develop a statistical theory of these topological transitions in an N-mode quantum-dot Josephson junction, by associating the Andreev level crossings with the real eigenvalues of a random non-Hermitian matrix. The number of topological transitions in a 2pi phase interval scales as sqrt(N) and their spacing distribution is a hybrid of the Wigner and Poisson distributions of random-matrix theory.Comment: 12 pages, 15 figures; v2 to appear in PRL, with appendix in the supplementary materia

Transit peptide elements mediate selective protein targeting to two different types of chloroplasts in the single-cell C4 species Bienertia sinuspersici.

110Ysciescopu

Biexciton recombination rates in self-assembled quantum dots

The radiative recombination rates of interacting electron-hole pairs in a quantum dot are strongly affected by quantum correlations among electrons and holes in the dot. Recent measurements of the biexciton recombination rate in single self-assembled quantum dots have found values spanning from two times the single exciton recombination rate to values well below the exciton decay rate. In this paper, a Feynman path-integral formulation is developed to calculate recombination rates including thermal and many-body effects. Using real-space Monte Carlo integration, the path-integral expressions for realistic three-dimensional models of InGaAs/GaAs, CdSe/ZnSe, and InP/InGaP dots are evaluated, including anisotropic effective masses. Depending on size, radiative rates of typical dots lie in the regime between strong and intermediate confinement. The results compare favorably to recent experiments and calculations on related dot systems. Configuration interaction calculations using uncorrelated basis sets are found to be severely limited in calculating decay rates.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure