Bulletin of the American Physical Society
Braiding floquet majorana modes in one-dimensional topological superconductors
Bill P. Truong
Abstract
The topic of Majorana zero modes has been a focal point of the condensed matter physicscommunity in recent times due in part to their potential applications in quantum computation.Most notably, the exotic exchange statistics of Majorana zero modes form the basis oftopologically protected quantum gates. The physical exchange, or braiding, of Majorana zeromodes is often modeled in two-dimensional systems or by using networks of wires. Recentwork has established that Majorana zero modes can be braided in a purely one-dimensionalsetting with a periodic, or Floquet, drive. Specifically, the work of Bauer et al. in Ref.[1] demonstrates that a working braiding protocol can be simulated on a Kitaev chain withperiodically modulated parameters. This Floquet system gives rise to both Majorana zeromodes and Majorana pi modes, the latter of which serves as an additional degree of freedomin the braiding protocol.We reproduce the results of Ref. [1] through numerical simulation and extend theirbraiding protocol such that it includes both disorder and interactions. We demonstrate thatthe protocol remains successful when the disorder is weak compared to the parameters of thesystem. In the case of strong disorder, we demonstrate that the protocol fails. In addition,we show that the protocol is quite sensitive to the presence of interactions. We illustratethat interactions cause a severe delocalization of the Majorana zero modes leading to thefailure of the protocol