Seminarium Fizyki Materii Skondensowanej

The thermal quantum Hall effect appears in the absence of time-reversalsymmetry in a single layer of a chiral p-wave superconductor. Theinsulator-insulator transition associated with this effect is genericallypresent only for weak disorder. For stronger disorder one finds atransition to a delocalized phase, known as the thermal metal.In contrast, for a helical superconductor in the presence of time-reversalsymmetry the transition between two topologically distinct thermalinsulators occurs via the intervening thermal metal phase, even for anarbitrarily weak disorder.We present a detailed study of a phase diagram and the critical exponentsfor these topologically induced transitions. We also point to an underlingmechanism of Majorana states formation in both chiral and helical systems.