No Arabic abstract
We study the possibility to realize Majorana zero mode that is robust and may be easily manipulated for braiding in quantum computing in the ground state of the Kitaev model in this work. To achieve this we first apply a uniform conical magnetic field to the gapless Kitaev model and turn the Kitaev model to an effective p+ip topological superconductor of spinons. We then study possible vortex binding in such system to a topologically trivial spot in the ground state. We consider two cases in the system. One is a vacancy and the other is a fully polarized spin. We show that in both cases, the system binds a vortex with the defect and a robust Majorana zero mode in the ground state at a weak uniform conical magnetic field. The distribution and asymptotic behavior of these Majorana zero modes is studied. The Majorana zero modes in both cases decay exponentially in space, and are robust against local perturbations and other Majorana zero modes far away, which makes them promissing candidate for braiding in topological quantum computing.
We study the effects of the flux configurations on the emergent Majorana fermions in the $S=1/2$ Kitaev model on a honeycomb lattice, where quantum spins are fractionalized into itinerant Majorana fermions and localized fluxes. A quantum spin liquid appears as the ground state of the Kitaev model in the flux-free sector, which has intensively been investigated so far. In this flux sector, the Majorana fermion system has linear dispersions and shows power law behavior in the Majorana correlations. On the other hand, periodically-arranged flux configurations yield low-energy excitations in the Majorana fermion system, which are distinctly different from those in the flux-free state. We find that one of the periodically arranged flux states results in the gapped Majorana dispersion and the exponential decay in the Majorana correlations. The Kitaev system with another flux configuration exhibits a semi-Dirac like dispersion, leading to the power law decay with a smaller power than that in the flux-free sector along symmetry axes. We also examine the effect of the randomness in the flux configurations and clarify that the Majorana density of states is filled by increasing the flux density, and power-law decay in the Majorana correlations remains. The present results could be important to control the motion of Majorana fermions, which carries the spin excitations, in the Kitaev candidate materials.
Realizing topological superconductivity and Majorana zero modes in the laboratory is one of the major goals in condensed matter physics. We review the current status of this rapidly-developing field, focusing on semiconductor-superconductor proposals for topological superconductivity. Material science progress and robust signatures of Majorana zero modes in recent experiments are discussed. After a brief introduction to the subject, we outline several next-generation experiments probing exotic properties of Majorana zero modes, including fusion rules and non-Abelian exchange statistics. Finally, we discuss prospects for implementing Majorana-based topological quantum computation in these systems.
We study a quantum spin Kitaev model with zigzag edges to clarify the effects of anisotropy in the exchange couplings on the spin propagation. We simulate the spin and Majorana dynamics triggered by a magnetic pulse, using the real-space time-dependent Majorana mean-field theory. When the anisotropy is small, the dispersion of the itinerant Majorana fermions remains gapless, where the velocity of the spin propagation matches the group velocity of the itinerant Majorana fermions at the nodal points. On the other hand, in the gapped system with a large anisotropy, the spin propagation is strongly suppressed although its nature depends on the shape of the pulse. The spin transport in the junction system described by the Kitaev models with distinct anisotropies is also dressed.
The Raman scattering with local optical excitation from the Majorana edge modes of Kitaev spin liquids and topological superconductors is studied theoretically. Although the effective one-dimensional model is common between these two cases, the coupling to the electromagnetic field is different. It is found that the Raman spectrum at low energy scales with $omega^3$ in Kitaev spin liquids while it shows the gap in topological superconductors. This is in sharp contrast to the infrared absorption, where the spectrum shows the gap in Kitaev spin liquids, while it behaves as $sim omega^2$ in topological superconductors. This indicates that the electrodynamics of Majorana edge modes depends on their higher-dimensional origins. The realistic estimate of the Raman scattering intensity is given for $alpha$-RuCl$_3$ as the candidate for Kitaev spin liquid.
We investigate the number-anomalous of the Majorana zero modes in the non-Hermitian Kitaev chain, whose hopping and superconductor paring strength are both imbalanced. We find that the combination of two imbalanced non-Hermitian terms can induce defective Majorana edge states, which means one of the two localized edge states will disappear due to the non-Hermitian suppression effect. As a result, the conventional bulk-boundary correspondence is broken down. Besides, the defective edge states are mapped to the ground states of non-Hermitian transverse field Ising model, and the global phase diagrams of ferromagnetic-antiferromagnetic crossover for ground states are given. Our work, for the first time, reveal the break of topological robustness for the Majorana zero modes, which predict more novel effects both in topological material and in non-Hermitian physics.