Anomalous Proximity Effect Under Andreev and Majorana Bound States

Abstract We theoretically study the anomalous proximity effect in a clean normal metal/disordered normal metal/superconductor junction based on a Rashba semiconductor nanowire model. The system hosts two distinct phases: a trivial helical phase with zero-energy Andreev bound states and a topological phase with Majorana bound states. We analyze the local density of states and induced pair correlations at the edge of the normal metal region. We investigate their behavior under scalar onsite disorder and changing the superconductor and disordered region lengths in the trivial helical and topological phases. We find that both phases exhibit a zero-energy peak in the local density of states and spin-triplet pair correlations in the clean limit, which we attribute primarily to odd-frequency spin-triplet pairs. Disorder rapidly splits the zero-energy peak in the trivial helical phase regardless of the lengths of the superconductor and disordered normal regions. The zero-energy peak in the topological phase shows similar fragility when the superconductor region is short. However, for long superconductor regions, the zero-energy peak in the topological phase remains robust against disorder. In contrast, spin-singlet correlations are suppressed near zero energy in both phases. Our results highlight that the robustness of the zero-energy peak against scalar disorder, contingent on the superconductor region length, serves as a key indicator distinguishing trivial Andreev bound states from topological Majorana bound states.