Atanu Rajak

Survival probability of an edge Majorana in a one-dimensional p-wave superconducting chain under sudden quenching of parameters.

We consider the temporal evolution of a zero-energy edge Majorana of a spinless p-wave superconducting chain following a sudden change of a parameter of the Hamiltonian. Starting from one of the topological phases that has an edge Majorana, the system is suddenly driven to the other topological phase or to the (topologically) trivial phases and to the quantum critical points (QCPs) separating these phases. The survival probability of the initial edge Majorana as a function of time is studied following the quench. Interestingly when the chain is quenched to the QCP, we find a nearly perfect oscillation of the survival probability, indicating that the Majorana travels back and forth between two ends, with a time period that scales with the system size. We also generalize to the situation when there is a next-nearest-neighbor hopping in a superconducting chain and there results in a pair of edge Majorana at each end of the chain in the topological phase. We show that the frequency of oscillation of the survival probability gets doubled in this case. We also perform an instantaneous quenching of the Hamiltonian (with two Majorana modes at each end of the chain) to an another Hamiltonian which has only one Majorana mode in equilibrium; the MSP shows oscillations as a function of time with a noticeable decay in the amplitude. On the other hand for a quenching which is reverse to the previous one, the MSP decays rapidly and stays close to zero with fluctuations in amplitude.

Fidelity susceptibility and Loschmidt echo for generic paths in a three-spin interacting transverse Ising model

We study the effect of the presence of different types of critical points, such as ordinary critical points, multicritical points and quasicritical points, along different paths on the fidelity susceptibility and Loschmidt echo of a three-spin interacting transverse Ising chain using a method that does not involve the language of tensors. We find that the scaling of the fidelity susceptibility and Loschmidt echo with the system size at these special critical points of the model studied is in agreement with the known results, thus supporting our method.

Effect of double local quenches on the Loschmidt echo and entanglement entropy of a one-dimensional quantum system

We study the effect of two simultaneous local quenches on the evolution of the Loschmidt echo (LE) and entanglement entropy (EE) of a one dimensional transverse Ising model. In this work, one of the local quenches involves the connection of two spin-1/2 chains at a certain time and the other corresponds to a sudden change in the magnitude of the transverse field at a given site in one of the spin chains. We numerically calculate the dynamics associated with the LE and the EE as a result of such double quenches, and discuss the various timescales involved in this problem using the picture of quasiparticles (QPs) generated as a result of such quenches. We perform a detailed analysis of the probability of QPs produced at the two sites and the nature of the QPs in various phases, and obtain interesting results. More specifically, we find partial reflection of these QPs at the defect center or the site of h-quench, resulting in new timescales which have never been reported before.

Possibility of adiabatic transport of a Majorana edge state through an extended gapless region.

In the context of slow quenching dynamics of a p-wave superconducting chain, it has been shown that a Majorana edge state cannot be adiabatically transported from one topological phase to the other separated by a quantum critical line. On the other hand, the inclusion of a phase factor in the hopping term, which breaks the effective time-reversal invariance, results in an extended gapless region between two topological phases. We show that for a finite chain with an open boundary condition, there exists a nonzero probability that a Majorana edge state can be adiabatically transported from one topological phase to the other across this gapless region following a slow quench of the superconducting term; this happens for an optimum transit time, which is proportional to the system size and diverges for a thermodynamically large chain. We attribute this phenomenon to the mixing of the Majorana only with low-lying inverted bulk states. Remarkably, the Majorana state always persists with the same probability even after the quenching is stopped. For a periodic chain, on the other hand, we find a Kibble-Zurek scaling of the defect density with a renormalized rate of quenching.

Survival probability in a quenched Majorana chain with an impurity

We investigate the dynamics of a one-dimensional p-wave superconductor with next-nearest-neighbor hopping and superconducting interaction derived from a three-spin interacting Ising model in transverse field by mapping to Majorana fermions. The next-nearest-neighbor hopping term leads to a new topological phase containing two zero-energy Majorana modes at each end of an open chain, compared to a nearest-neighbor p-wave superconducting chain. We study the Majorana survival probability (MSP) of a particular Majorana edge state when the initial Hamiltonian (H_{i}) is changed to the quantum critical as well as off-critical final Hamiltonian (H_{f}), which additionally contains an impurity term (H_{imp}) that breaks the time-reversal invariance. For the off-critical quenching inside the new topological phase with H_{f}=H_{i}+H_{imp}, and small impurity strength (λ_{d}), we observe a perfect oscillation of the MSP as a function of time with a single frequency (determined by the impurity strength λ_{d}) that can be analyzed from an equivalent two-level problem. On the other hand, the MSP shows a beating like structure with time for quenching to the phase boundary separating the topological phase (with two edge Majoranas at each edge) and the nontopological phase where the additional frequency is given by inverse of the system size. We attribute this behavior of the MSP to the modification of the energy levels of the final Hamiltonian due to the application of the impurity term.