English

Dynamical generation of Floquet Majorana flat bands in s-wave superconductors

Superconductivity 2015-05-04 v1 Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics Quantum Physics

Abstract

We present quantum control techniques to engineer flat bands of symmetry-protected Majorana edge modes in s-wave superconductors. Specifically, we show how periodic control may be employed for designing time-independent effective Hamiltonians, which support FloquetFloquet MajoranaMajorana flatflat bandsbands, starting from equilibrium conditions that are either topologically trivial or only support individual Majorana pairs. In the first approach, a suitable modulation of the chemical potential simultaneously induces Majorana flat bands and dynamically activatesactivates a pre-existing chiral symmetry which is responsible for their protection. In the second approach, the application of effective parity kicks dynamically generatesgenerates a desired chiral symmetry by suppressing chirality-breaking terms in the static Hamiltonian. Our results demonstrate how the use of time-dependent control enlarges the range of possibilities for realizing gapless topological superconductivity, potentially enabling access to topological states of matter that have no known equilibrium counterpart.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1412.2639,
  title  = {Dynamical generation of Floquet Majorana flat bands in s-wave superconductors},
  author = {Amrit Poudel and Gerardo Ortiz and Lorenza Viola},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1412.2639},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

6 pages, 5 figures, submitted to EPL