Kavli Affiliate: Michael Wimmer
| First 5 Authors: Isidora Araya Day, Antonio L. R. Manesco, Michael Wimmer, Anton R. Akhmerov,
| Summary:
The easily accessible experimental signatures of Majorana modes are ambiguous
and only probe topology indirectly: for example, quasi-Majorana states mimic
most properties of Majoranas. Establishing a correspondence between an
experiment and a theoretical model known to be topological resolves this
ambiguity. Here we demonstrate that already theoretically determining whether a
finite system is topological is by itself ambiguous. In particular, we show
that the scattering topological invariant — a probe of topology most closely
related to transport signatures of Majoranas — has multiple biases in finite
systems. For example, we identify that quasi-Majorana states also mimic the
scattering invariant of Majorana zero modes in intermediate-sized systems. We
expect that the bias due to finite size effects is universal, and advocate that
the analysis of topology in finite systems should be accompanied by a
comparison with the thermodynamic limit. Our results are directly relevant to
the applications of the topological gap protocol.
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