Universal transport signatures of topological superconductivity in quantum spin Hall architectures

Interfacing s-wave superconductors with quantum spin Hall systems provides a promising route to ``engineered'' topological superconductivity. Given exciting recent progress on the fabrication side, identifying experiments that definitively expose the topological superconducting phase (and clearly distinguish it from a trivial state) raises an increasingly important problem. With this goal in mind we use renormalization group methods to extract universal transport characteristics of superconductor/quantum spin Hall heterostructures where the native edge states serve as a lead. Interestingly, arbitrarily weak interactions induce qualitative changes in the behavior relative to the free-fermion limit, leading to a sharp dichotomy in conductance for the trivial (narrow superconductor) and topological (wide superconductor) cases. Furthermore, we find that strong interactions can in principle induce power-law-localized ``parafermion'' excitations at a superconductor/quantum spin Hall junction.