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  • Letter

Two-particle Berry phase mechanism for Dirac and Majorana Kramers pairs of corner modes

Yi Tan1,2,*, Zhi-Hao Huang1,2,*, and Xiong-Jun Liu1,2,3,4,†

  • 1International Center for Quantum Materials and School of Physics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
  • 2Collaborative Innovation Center of Quantum Matter, Beijing 100871, China
  • 3CAS Center for Excellence in Topological Quantum Computation, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China
  • 4Institute for Quantum Science and Engineering and Department of Physics, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen 518055, China

  • *These authors contributed equally to this work.
  • †Corresponding author: xiongjunliu@pku.edu.cn.
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Phys. Rev. B 105, L041105 – Published 13 January, 2022

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.105.L041105

Abstract

We uncover an alternative two-particle Berry phase mechanism to realize exotic corner modes in second-order topological insulators (TIs) and topological superconductors (TSCs) with time-reversal symmetry. We show that the nontrivial pseudospin textures of edge states in two different types of two-dimensional TIs give rise to different two-particle geometric phases in the particle-hole and particle-particle channels, respectively, for which the edge mass domain walls or intrinsic π junctions emerge across corners when an external magnetic field or s-wave superconductivity is considered, hosting Dirac or Majorana corner modes. Remarkably, with this mechanism we predict the Majorana Kramers pair of corner modes by directly coupling the edge of a type-II time-reversal invariant TI to a uniform s-wave SC, in sharp contrast to previous proposals which rely on unconventional SC pairing or a complex setting for a fine-tuned SC π junction. We find Au/GaAs(111) to be a realistic material candidate for realizing such a Majorana Kramers pair of corner modes.

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Phys. Rev. B 105, L041105– Published 13 January, 2022
  • Received 6 July 2021
  • Accepted 5 January 2022
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