Topologically protected braiding in a single wire using Floquet Majorana modes

ORAL

Abstract

The non-Abelian nature of Majorana zero modes is most prominently exhibited through braiding. While originally formulated for 2D systems, it has been shown that braiding can also be realized using 1D wires by forming an essentially 2D network. Here, we show that in driven systems far from equilibrium, one can do away with the second spatial dimension altogether by instead using quasienergy as the second dimension. To realize this, we use a Floquet topological superconductor which can exhibit Majorana modes at two special eigenvalues of the evolution operator, 0 and Pi, and thus can realize four Majorana modes in a single, driven quantum wire. We describe and numerically evaluate a protocol that realizes non-local braiding of two Majorana zero modes in a single wire by adiabatically modulating the Floquet drive and using the Pi modes as auxiliary degrees of freedom.

*This work was supported by NSERC DG (TPB), the BSF and ISF grants and by the ERC under the European Community’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007–2013)/ERC - Grant agreement MUNATOP-340210. YO and EB acknowledge support from CRC 183 of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. We are also grateful for the hospitality of the Aspen Center for Physics, which is supported by National Science Foundation grant PHY-1607761.

Presenters

  • Torsten Karzig

    • Microsoft Station Q, Microsoft Quantum
    • Station Q, Microsoft Corp
    • Station Q, Microsoft
    • Station-Q, Microsoft Research
    • Microsoft Corp
    • Microsoft

Authors

  • Torsten Karzig

    • Microsoft Station Q, Microsoft Quantum
    • Station Q, Microsoft Corp
    • Station Q, Microsoft
    • Station-Q, Microsoft Research
    • Microsoft Corp
    • Microsoft
  • Bela Bauer

    • Microsoft Corp.
    • Microsoft
    • Microsoft Station Q
    • Station Q, Microsoft
    • Station Q, Microsoft Research
  • Tami Pereg-Barnea

    • McGill University
    • Department of Physics, McGill University
  • Maria-Theresa Rieder

    • Department of Condensed Matter Physics, Weizmann Institute
  • Gil Refael

    • Department of Physics, Caltech
  • Erez Berg

    • Weizmann Institute of Science
    • Physics, Weizmann Institute of Science
    • Chicago University
    • Condensed Matter Physics, Weizmann Institute
    • Department of Physics, University of Chicago
    • Physics, University of Chicago
    • Department of Condensed Matter Physics, Weizmann Institute of Science
  • Yuval Oreg

    • Weizmann Institute of Science
    • Department of Condensed Matter Physics, Weizmann Institute