Jay D. Sau, Brian Swingle, Sumanta Tewari
Topological Majorana fermion (MF) quasiparticles have been recently shown to exist in semiconductor quantum wires with proximity induced superconductivity and a Zeeman field. Although the experimentally observed zero bias tunneling peak and a fractional ac-Josephson effect can be taken as necessary signatures of MFs, neither of them constitutes a sufficient "smoking gun" experiment. Since one pair of Majorana fermions share a single conventional fermionic degree of freedom, MFs are in a sense fractionalized excitations. Based on this fractionalization we propose a tunneling experiment that furnishes a nearly unique signature of end state MFs in semiconductor quantum wires. In particular, we show that a "teleportation"-like experiment is not enough to distinguish MFs from accidental conventional zero energy states, but our proposed tunneling experiment, in principle, can make this distinction.
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http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.5514
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