The anomalous 4π-periodic ac Josephson effect, a hallmark of topological Josephson junctions, was experimentally observed in a quantum spin Hall insulator. This finding is unexpected due to time-reversal symmetry preventing the backscattering of the helical edge states and therefore suppressing the 4π-periodic component of the Josephson current. Here, we analyze the two-particle inelastic scattering as a possible explanation for this experimental finding. We show that a sufficiently strong inelastic scattering restores the 4π-periodic component of the current beyond the short Josephson junction regime. Its signature is an observable peak in the power spectrum of the junction at half the Josephson frequency. We propose to use the exponential dependence of the peak width on the applied bias and the magnitude of the dc current as means of verifying that the inelastic scattering is indeed the mechanism responsible for the 4π-periodic signal.

We propose a platform to realize nodal topological superconductors in a superconducting monolayer of MoX2(X=S,Se,Te) using an in-plane magnetic field. The bulk nodal points appear where the spin splitting due to spin-orbit coupling vanishes near the ±K valleys of the Brillouin zone and are six or twelve per valley in total. In the nodal topological superconducting phase, the nodal points are connected by flat bands of zero-energy Andreev edge states. These flat bands, which are protected by chiral symmetry, are present for all lattice-termination boundaries except zigzag.

We study the effects of strong coupling between a superconductor and a semiconductor nanowire on the creation of the Majorana bound states, when the quasiparticle dwell time in the normal part of the nanowire is much shorter than the inverse superconducting gap. This "short-junction" limit is relevant for the recent experiments using the epitaxially grown aluminum characterized by a transparent interface with the semiconductor and a small superconducting gap. We find that the small superconducting gap does not have a strong detrimental effect on the Majorana properties. Specifically, both the critical magnetic field required for creating a topological phase and the size of the Majorana bound states are independent of the superconducting gap. The critical magnetic field scales with the wire cross section, while the relative importance of the orbital and Zeeman effects of the magnetic field is controlled by the material parameters only: g factor, effective electron mass, and the semiconductor-superconductor interface transparency.

We report an attractive critical point occurring in the Anderson localization scaling flow of symplectic models on fractals. The scaling theory of Anderson localization predicts that in disordered symplectic two-dimensional systems weak-antilocalization effects lead to a metal-insulator transition. This transition is characterized by a repulsive critical point above which the system becomes metallic. Fractals possess a noninteger scaling of conductance in the classical limit which can be continuously tuned by changing the fractal structure. We demonstrate that in disordered symplectic Hamiltonians defined on fractals with classical conductance scaling g∼L-, for βmax 0.15, the metallic phase is replaced by a critical phase with a scale-invariant conductance dependent on the fractal dimensionality. Our results show that disordered fractals allow an explicit construction and verification of the expansion.