Generating Many Majorana Modes via Periodic Driving: A Superconductor Model

Qing-Jun Tong, Jun-Hong An, Jiangbin Gong, Hong-Gang Luo, C. H. Oh

Published 2012-11-12, updated 2013-05-17Version 2

Realizing Majorana modes (MMs) in condensed-matter systems is of vast experimental and theoretical interests, and some signatures of MMs have been measured already. To facilitate future experimental observations and to explore further applications of MMs, generating many MMs at ease in an experimentally accessible manner has become one important issue. This task is achieved here in a one-dimensional $p$-wave superconductor system with the nearest- and next-nearest-neighbor interactions. In particular, a periodic modulation of some system parameters can induce an effective long-range interaction (as suggested by the Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff formula) and may recover time-reversal symmetry already broken in undriven cases. By exploiting these two independent mechanisms at once we have established a general method in generating many Floquet MMs via periodic driving.