Two-site Kitaev sweet spots evolving into topological islands

TL;DR

This paper investigates how sweet spots in two-site Kitaev chains evolve into topological regions as the chain length increases, demonstrating increased protection and robustness of Majorana Bound States with longer chains, facilitating experimental detection.

Contribution

It reveals that increasing the chain length transforms sweet spots into topological islands, easing the experimental realization and stabilization of Majorana Bound States in Kitaev chains.

Findings

Sweet spots evolve into larger, protected topological islands with increasing chain length.

Long chains (N ≥ 20) exhibit zero-energy conductance plateaus robust against disorder.

Conductance measurements can detect the emergence of topological regions in the chain.

Abstract

Artificial Kitaev chains based on arrays of quantum dots are promising platforms for realizing Majorana Bound States (MBSs). In a two-site Kitaev chain, it is possible to find these non-Abelian zero-energy excitations at certain points in parameter space (sweet spots). These states, commonly referred to as Poor man's Majorana bound states (PMMs), are challenging to find and stabilize experimentally. In this work, we investigate the evolution of the sweet spots as we increase the number of sites of the Kitaev chain. To this end, we use the Bogoliubov-de Gennes representation to study the excitations of the system, and the scattering matrix and Green functions formalisms to calculate the zero-bias conductance. Our results show that the sweet spots evolve into a region that grows bigger and becomes gradually more protected as the number of sites $N$ increases. Due to the protection of the MBSs, we refer to this region as a topological island. We obtain similar results by considering a realistic spinful model with finite magnetic fields in a chain of normal-superconducting quantum dots. For long chains, $N \geq 20$, we show the emergence of strictly zero-energy plateaus robust against disorder. Finally, we demonstrate that the topological islands can be observed by performing conductance measurements via a quantum dot side-coupled to the Kitaev chain. Our work shows that the fine-tuning required to create and detect PMMs in a 2-site Kitaev chain is significantly relaxed as the length of the chain increases and details how PMMs evolve into MBSs. Our results are consistent with experimental reports for 2 and 3-site chains.