AC Josephson effect in finite-length nanowire junctions with Majorana modes

Pablo San-Jose, Elsa Prada, Ramon Aguado

Published 2011-12-27, updated 2012-06-19Version 2

It has been predicted that superconducting junctions made with topological nanowires hosting Majorana bound states (MBS) exhibit an anomalous 4\pi-periodic Josephson effect. Finding an experimental setup with these unconventional properties poses, however, a serious challenge: for finite-length wires, the equilibrium supercurrents are always 2\pi-periodic as anticrossings of states with the same fermionic parity are possible. We show, however, that the anomaly survives in the transient regime of the ac Josephson effect. Transients are moreover protected against decay by quasiparticle poisoning as a consequence of the quantum Zeno effect, which fixes the parity of Majorana qubits. The resulting long-lived ac Josephson transients may be effectively used to detect MBS.