Partial Equilibration of the Anti-Pfaffian Edge due to Majorana Disorder

Phys Rev Lett. 2020 Mar 27;124(12):126801. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.126801.

Abstract

We consider electrical and thermal equilibration of the edge modes of the anti-Pfaffian quantum Hall state at ν=5/2 due to tunneling of the Majorana edge mode to trapped Majorana zero modes in the bulk. Such tunneling breaks translational invariance and allows scattering between Majorana and other edge modes in such a way that there is a parametric difference between the length scales for equilibration of charge and heat transport between integer and Bose mode, on the one hand, and for thermal equilibration of the Majorana edge mode, on the other hand. We discuss a parameter regime in which this mechanism could explain the recent observation of quantized heat transport [M. Banerjee et al., Nature (London) 559, 205 (2018)NATUAS0028-083610.1038/s41586-018-0184-1].