Floquet topological superconductors with many Majorana edge modes: topological invariants, entanglement spectrum and bulk-edge correspondence

Abstract

One-dimensional (1D) Floquet topological superconductors possess two types of degenerate Majorana edge modes at zero and π quasienergies, leaving more room for the design of boundary time crystals and quantum computing schemes than their static counterparts. In this work, we discover Floquet superconducting phases with large topological invariants and arbitrarily many Majorana edge modes in periodically driven Kitaev chains (KCs). Topological winding numbers defined for the Floquet operator and Floquet entanglement Hamiltonian are found to generate consistent predictions about the phase diagram, bulk-edge correspondence and numbers of zero and π Majorana edge modes of the system under different driving protocols. The bipartite entanglement entropy further shows non-analytic behaviors around the topological transition point between different Floquet superconducting phases. These general features are demonstrated by investigating the KC with periodically kicked pairing or hopping amplitudes. Our discovery reveals the rich topological phases and many Majorana edge modes that could be brought about by periodic driving fields in 1D superconducting systems. It further introduces a unified description for a class of Floquet topological superconductors from their quasienergy bands and entanglement properties.

Keywords

• Floquet system
• topological phases of matter
• topological superconductor
• Floquet engineering