Non-Hermiticity stabilized Majorana zero modes in semiconductor-superconductor nanowires

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that non-Hermitian dissipation can stabilize Majorana zero modes in semiconductor-superconductor nanowires, enabling their use in quantum computing by preserving their non-Abelian properties.

Contribution

It introduces a method to stabilize Majorana zero modes using non-Hermitian dissipation, overcoming issues caused by coupled modes with nonzero energies.

Findings

Non-Hermitian dissipation shifts coupled Majorana modes to zero energy.

Dark Majorana modes exhibit negligible dissipation and retain non-Abelian properties.

The approach enhances the robustness of Majorana modes for quantum applications.

Abstract

Coupled Majorana zero modes with nonzero energies are generally detrimental to the non-Abelian statistics due to the additional dynamic phase. Nevertheless, we show that a well-connected lead can introduce a local non-Hermitian dissipation term to shift the energies of the both coupled Majorana modes to zero, and surprisingly turn the coupled Majorana mode far from the lead into a dark Majorana mode with exponentially small dissipation. This dark Majorana mode can conquer the drawback of the partially overlapped Majorana zero modes and possess the properties of true Majorana zero mode such as the perfect fractional Josephson effect and the non-Abelian statistics.