Effect of incommensurate disorder on the resonant tunneling through Majorana bound states on the topological superconductor chains

Pei Wang, Shu Chen, Gao Xianlong

Published 2013-08-22, updated 2014-03-01Version 2

We study the transport through the Kitaev's chain with incommensurate potentials coupled to two normal leads by the numerical operator method. We find a quantized linear conductance of $e^2/h$, which is independent to the disorder strength and the gate voltage in a wide range, signaling the Majorana bound states. While the incommensurate disorder suppresses the current at finite voltage bias, and then narrows the linear response regime of the $I-V$ curve which exhibits two plateaus corresponding to the superconducting gap and the band edge respectively. The linear conductance abruptly drops to zero as the disorder strength reaches the critical value $2+2\Delta$ with $\Delta$ the p-wave pairing amplitude, corresponding to the transition from the topological superconducting phase to the Anderson localized phase. Changing the gate voltage will also cause an abrupt drop of the linear conductance by driving the chain into the topologically trivial superconducting phase, whose $I-V$ curve exhibits an exponential shape.