Topological Kondo Superconductors.

Motivated by the observation of chiral surface states in UTe₂, [1] we consider a model for topological superconductivity in a two dimensional Kondo lattice. We consider the effect of spin-orbit coupling in which conduction electrons are antiferromagnetically coupled to a Yao-Lee spin liquid. When a Rashba spin-orbit interaction and a nearest-neighbor Kondo interaction is introduced, the low-energy Majorana bands become gapped and develop Chern numbers, protecting unidirectionally propagating Majorana edge modes. Our model[2] describes a chiral topological superconductor with spontaneously broken time-reversal symmetry, which may be of interest for certain heavy fermion superconductors, such as UTe2. This work was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation grant DMR-1830707.

[1]L. Jiao, S. Howard, S. Ran, Z. Wang, J. O. Rodriguez, M. Sigrist, Z. Wang, N. P. Butch, and V. Madhavan, Chiral superconductivity in heavy-fermion metal UTe2, Nature 579, 523 (2020).