Topology by Dissipation: Majorana Bosons in Metastable Quadratic Markovian Dynamics

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that Majorana bosons can emerge in noninteracting bosonic chains with Markovian dissipation due to topological metastability, challenging previous restrictions and suggesting new topological phases in transient regimes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel mechanism for Majorana bosons in dissipative bosonic systems, highlighting the role of metastability and topology in their emergence.

Findings

Majorana bosons can exist in dissipative bosonic chains.

These bosons are robust against disorder and detectable in steady-state spectra.

Topological metastability enables symmetry-protected phases in transient regimes.

Abstract

Majorana bosons, that is, tight bosonic analogs of the Majorana fermionic quasiparticles of condensed matter physics, are forbidden for gapped free bosonic matter within a standard Hamiltonian scenario. We show how the interplay between dynamical metastability and nontrivial bulk topology makes their emergence possible in noninteracting bosonic chains undergoing Markovian dissipation. This leads to a distinctive form of topological metastability, whereby a conserved Majorana boson localized on one edge is paired, in general, with a symmetry generator localized on the opposite edge. We argue that Majorana bosons are robust against disorder and identifiable by signatures in the zero-frequency steady-state power spectrum. Our results suggest that symmetry-protected topological phases for free bosons may arise in transient metastable regimes, which persist over practical timescales.