Josephson-Current Signatures of Unpaired Floquet Majorana Bound States

TL;DR

This paper investigates the transport signatures of unpaired Floquet Majorana bound states in driven topological superconductors, revealing unique Josephson current behaviors and a Floquet sum rule through analytical and numerical methods.

Contribution

It introduces analytical expressions for Josephson currents involving Floquet Majorana states and uncovers a Floquet sum rule, advancing understanding of driven topological superconductors.

Findings

Josephson current is $4\pi$-periodic in phase difference.

Current amplitude can be tuned via chemical potential at harmonics of drive frequency.

Analytical results are confirmed with numerical simulations.

Abstract

We theoretically study the transport signatures of unpaired Floquet Majorana bound states in the Josephson current of weakly linked, periodically driven topological superconductors. We obtain the occupation of the Floquet Majorana modes in the presence of weak coupling to thermal leads analytically, and show that, similar to static superconductors, the Josephson current involving Floquet Majorana bound states is also $4\pi$-periodic in the phase difference across the junction, and also depends linearly on the coupling between superconductors. Moreover, unlike the static case, the amplitude of the Josephson current can be tuned by setting the unbiased chemical potential of the driven superconductors at multiple harmonics of the drive frequency. As a result, we uncover a Josephson Floquet sum rule for driven superconductors. We confirm our analytical expressions for Josephson current, the occupation of Floquet bands, and a perturbative analysis of the quasienergies with numerically exact results.