Floquet Majorana edge modes capture the topological features of periodically driven superconductors. We present a Kitaev chain with multiple time periodic driving and demonstrate how the avoidance of bands crossing is altered, which gives rise to new regions supporting Majorana edge modes. A one dimensional generalized method was proposed to predict Majorana edge modes via the Zak phase of the Floquet bands. We also study the time independent effective Hamiltonian at high frequency limit and introduce diverse index to characterize topological phases with different relative phase between the multiple driving. Our work enriches the physics of driven system and paves the way for locating Majorana edge modes in larger parameter space.
A single unit cell contains all the information about the bulk system, including the topological feature. The topological invariant can be extracted from a finite system, which consists of several unit cells under certain environment, such as a non-Hermitian external field. We investigate a non- Hermitian finite-size Kitaev chain with PT-symmetric chemical potentials. Exact solution at the symmetric point shows that Majorana edge modes can emerge as the coalescing states at exceptional points and PT symmetry breaking states. The coalescing zero mode is the finite-size projection of the conventional degenerate zero modes in a Hermitian infinite system with the open boundary condition. It indicates a variant of the bulk-edge correspondence: The number of Majorana edge modes in a finite non-Hermitian system can be the topological invariant to identify the topological phase of the corresponding bulk Hermitian system.
Majorana zero modes in a superconductor-semiconductor nanowire have been extensively studied during the past decade. Disorder remains a serious problem, preventing the definitive observation of topological Majorana bound states. Thus, it is worthwhile to revisit the simple model, the Kitaev chain, and study the effects of weak and strong disorder on the Kitaev chain. By comparing the role of disorder in a Kitaev chain with that in a nanowire, we find that disorder affects both systems but in a nonuniversal manner. In general, disorder has a much stronger effect on the nanowire than the Kitaev chain, particularly for weak to intermediate disorder. For strong disorder, both the Kitaev chain and nanowire manifest random featureless behavior due to universal Anderson localization. Only the vanishing and strong disorder regimes are thus universal, manifesting respectively topological superconductivity and Anderson localization, but the experimentally relevant intermediate disorder regime is nonuniversal with the details dependent on the disorder realization in the system.
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.
A pair of Majorana zero modes (MZMs) constitutes a nonlocal qubit whose entropy is $log 2$. Upon strongly coupling one of the constituent MZMs to a reservoir with a continuous density of states, a universal entropy change of $frac{1}{2}log 2$ is expected to be observed across an intermediate temperature plateau. We adapt the entropy-measurement scheme that was the basis of a recent experiment [Hartman et. al., Nat. Phys. 14, 1083 (2018)] to the case of a proximitized topological system hosting MZMs, and propose a method to measure this $frac{1}{2}log 2$ entropy change --- an unambiguous signature of the nonlocal nature of the topological state. This approach offers an experimental strategy to distinguish MZMs from non-topological states.
Contrary to the widespread belief that Majorana zero-energy modes, existing as bound edge states in 2D topological insulator (TI)-superconductor (SC) hybrid structures, are unaffected by non-magnetic static disorder by virtue of Andersons theorem, we show that such a protection against disorder does not exist in realistic multi-channel TI/SC/ferromagnetic insulator (FI) sandwich structures of experimental relevance since the time-reversal symmetry is explicitly broken locally at the SC/FI interface where the end Majorana mode (MM) resides. We find that although the MM itself and the emph{bulk} topological superconducting phase inside the TI are indeed universally protected against disorder, disorder-induced subgap states are generically introduced at the TI edge due to the presence of the FI/SC interface as long as multiple edge channels are occupied. We discuss the implications of the finding for the detection and manipulation of the edge MM in realistic TI/SC/FI experimental systems of current interest.