Tami Pereg-Barnea (McGill University)
The Kitaev chain is a toy model for a one dimensional topological superconductor. It demonstrates how the superconductor can host Majorana modes at its edges. These special modes are their own antiparticles, exhibit non-abelian statistics and can serve as building blocks of qubits.
In its original form the model is written for fermions (electron quasiparticles) and the Majoranas can be thought of as a half of an electron. In the fermionic part of the talk I will present some recent results on shuttling Maoranas on a 1D fermionic Kitaev chain. We will then introduce a bosonic analogue for the Kitaev model, intended for photonic or cold atom systems. This model does not result in Majorana edge modes as those can not be made of bosons. Nevertheless, the topology of the model leads to some interesting effects where a hermitian Hamiltonian leads to non-hermitian dynamics.
Contact : N. Laflorencie