Abstract
The modern understanding of topological insulators is based on Wannier obstructions in position space. Motivated by this insight, we study topological superconductors from a position-space perspective. For a one-dimensional superconductor, we show that the wave function of an individual Cooper pair decays exponentially with separation in the trivial phase and polynomially in the topological phase. For the position-space Majorana representation, we show that the topological phase is characterized by a nonzero Majorana polarization, which captures an irremovable and quantized separation of Majorana Wannier centers from the atomic positions. We apply our results to diagnose second-order topological superconducting phases in two dimensions. Our work establishes a vantage point for the generalization of topological quantum chemistry to superconductivity.
Original language | English (US) |
---|---|
Article number | 247001 |
Journal | Physical review letters |
Volume | 124 |
Issue number | 24 |
Early online date | Jun 15 2020 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jun 19 2020 |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Physics and Astronomy