Generating Many Majorana Modes via Periodic Driving: A Superconductor Model

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to generate numerous Majorana modes in a one-dimensional superconductor by using periodic driving to induce long-range interactions and restore symmetries, advancing experimental and theoretical research.

Contribution

The authors introduce a novel approach combining periodic modulation and symmetry restoration to produce many Floquet Majorana modes in a superconductor model.

Findings

Periodic driving induces effective long-range interactions.

Restoration of time-reversal symmetry enables multiple Majorana modes.

Method applicable to experimentally accessible superconductor systems.

Abstract

Realizing Majorana modes (MMs) in condensed-matter systems is of vast experimental and theoretical interests, and some signatures of MMs have been measured already. To facilitate future experimental observations and to explore further applications of MMs, generating many MMs at ease in an experimentally accessible manner has become one important issue. This task is achieved here in a one-dimensional $p$-wave superconductor system with the nearest- and next-nearest-neighbor interactions. In particular, a periodic modulation of some system parameters can induce an effective long-range interaction (as suggested by the Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff formula) and may recover time-reversal symmetry already broken in undriven cases. By exploiting these two independent mechanisms at once we have established a general method in generating many Floquet MMs via periodic driving.