Inducing chiral superconductivity on honeycomb lattice systems

Superconducting pairing correlations have a great impact on the topological properties of the quasiparticles in honeycomb lattice systems.  We utilize a Bogolyubov-de Gennes (BdG) Hamiltonian with a relative chemical potential shift between the particle and hole terms, and consider nearest-neighbor and next nearest-neighbor chiral spin-singlet (chiral d-wave superconductivity that is the preferred channel in some graphene models). With the application of a uniform magnetic field, the system exhibts non-trivial topological behavior.

The analysis we present suggests that the quasi-particle states in the presence of chiral superconductivity give rise to new non-trivial topological properties in the BdG Hamiltonian, which may result in the appearance of edge states along the zigzag edges of nanoribbons in the appropriate regime.

These different properties can be controlled in experiments by changing the chemical potential, producing tunable bandgap and different band curvatures, spin and particle-hole textures.