Fate of Majorana fermions and Chern numbers after a quantum quench.

Abstract

In the sequence of quenches to either nontopological phases or other topological phases, we study the stability of Majorana fermions at the edges of a two-dimensional topological superconductor with spin-orbit coupling and in the presence of a Zeeman term. Both instantaneous and slow quenches are considered. In the case of instantaneous quenches, the Majorana modes generally decay, but for a finite system there is a revival time that scales to infinity as the system size grows. Exceptions to this decaying behavior are found in some cases due to the presence of edge states with the same momentum in the final state. Quenches to a topological Z(2) phase reveal some robustness of the Majorana fermions in the sense that even though the survival probability of the Majorana state is small, it does not vanish. If the pairing is not aligned with the spin-orbit Rashba coupling, it is found that the Majorana fermions are fairly robust with a finite survival probability. It is also shown that the Chern number remains invariant after the quench, until the propagation of the mode along the transverse direction reaches the middle point, beyond which the Chern number fluctuates between increasing values. The effect of varying the rate of change in slow quenches is also analyzed. It is found that the defect production is nonuniversal and does not follow the Kibble-Zurek scaling with the quench rate, as obtained before for other systems with topological edge states.