Possibility of adiabatic transport of a Majorana edge state through an extended gapless region

Atanu Rajak, Tanay Nag, Amit Dutta

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15 Scopus citations

Abstract

In the context of slow quenching dynamics of a p-wave superconducting chain, it has been shown that a Majorana edge state cannot be adiabatically transported from one topological phase to the other separated by a quantum critical line. On the other hand, the inclusion of a phase factor in the hopping term, which breaks the effective time-reversal invariance, results in an extended gapless region between two topological phases. We show that for a finite chain with an open boundary condition, there exists a nonzero probability that a Majorana edge state can be adiabatically transported from one topological phase to the other across this gapless region following a slow quench of the superconducting term; this happens for an optimum transit time, which is proportional to the system size and diverges for a thermodynamically large chain. We attribute this phenomenon to the mixing of the Majorana only with low-lying inverted bulk states. Remarkably, the Majorana state always persists with the same probability even after the quenching is stopped. For a periodic chain, on the other hand, we find a Kibble-Zurek scaling of the defect density with a renormalized rate of quenching.

Original languageEnglish
Article number042107
JournalPhysical Review E
Volume90
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - 3 Oct 2014
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2014 American Physical Society.

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