Electronic structure of full-shell InAs/Al hybrid semiconductor-superconductor nanowires: Spin-orbit coupling and topological phase space

Abstract

We study the electronic structure of full-shell superconductor-semiconductor nanowires, which have recently been proposed for creating Majorana zero modes, using an eight-band $\vec{k} \cdot \vec{p}$ model within a fully self-consistent Schr\"{o}dinger-Poisson scheme. We find that the spin-orbit coupling induced by the intrinsic radial electric field is generically weak for sub-bands with their minimum near the Fermi energy. Furthermore, we show that the chemical potential windows consistent with the emergence of a topological phase are small and sparse and can only be reached by fine tunning the diameter of the wire. These findings suggest that the parameter space consistent with the realization of a topological phase in full-shell InAs/Al nanowires is, at best, very narrow.