Electron Interaction Effects in Periodically Driven Kitaev Model: Topology Breaking and Enhancement of Quantum Chaos

TL;DR

This paper investigates how electron-electron interactions influence the topological properties and quantum chaos in Floquet topological superconducting chains, revealing a transition from topology-preserving chaos to trivial chaos with increasing interaction strength.

Contribution

It provides a numerical analysis of interaction effects on Floquet topological superconductors, highlighting the coexistence of topology and chaos in weak interactions and the transition to trivial chaos under strong interactions.

Findings

Weak interactions preserve some topological features despite chaos.

Avoided crossings in spectra indicate partial chaos coexistence.

Strong interactions destroy topology and induce full chaos.

Abstract

The effect of electron-electron interaction on Floquet topological superconducting chains is investigated numerically through full diagonalization and time evolution. The preservation of topology in the weak interacting regime is represented by a many-body form of the Majorana survival probability, and the emergence of chaos is characterized using the level statistics. In the presence of weak interaction, there appear a multitude of avoided crossings in quasi-energy spectra, and the resulting chaos is not full but can coexist with the topology. Strong interaction will lead the system into a topologically trivial and fully chaotic phase.