Robust Majorana Conductance Peaks for a Superconducting Lead

Abstract

Experimental evidence for Majorana bound states largely relies on measurements of the tunneling conductance. While the conductance into a Majorana state is in principle quantized to 2e2/h, observation of this quantization has been elusive, presumably due to temperature broadening in the normal-metal lead. Here, we propose to use a superconducting lead instead, whose gap strongly suppresses thermal excitations. For a wide range of tunneling strengths and temperatures, a Majorana state is then signaled by symmetric conductance peaks at eV=±Δ with quantized height G=(4−π)2e2/h. For a superconducting scanning tunneling microscope tip, Majorana states appear as spatial conductance plateaus while the conductance varies with the local wavefunction for trivial Andreev bound states. We discuss effects of nonresonant (bulk) Andreev reflections and quasiparticle poisoning.