SciPost Phys. 3, 002 (2017) ·
published 7 July 2017
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We investigate the formation of Majorana fermions in finite-size graphene
strips with open boundary conditions in both directions, in the presence of an
in-plane magnetic field and in the proximity of a superconducting substrate. We
show that for long enough strips the Majorana states can form in the presence
of a Rashba-like spin-orbit coupling, as well as in the presence of an
inhomogeneous magnetic field. We find that, unlike infinite graphene ribbons in
which Majorana states arise solely close to the bottom of the band and the Van
Hove singularities, for finite-size systems this can happen also at much
smaller doping values, close to the Dirac points, and depends strongly on the
type of the short edges of the systems (e.g. armchair vs. zigzag), as well as
on the width of the ribbons.
