The 1D Ising model and the topological phase of the Kitaev chain

Abstract

It has been noted that the Kitaev chain, a p-wave superconductor with nearest-neighbor pairing amplitude equal to the hopping term Δ=t, and chemical potential μ=0, can be mapped into a nearest neighbor Ising model via a Jordan–Wigner transformation. Starting from the explicit eigenstates of the open Kitaev chain in terms of the original fermion operators, we elaborate that despite this formal equivalence the models are physically inequivalent, and show how the topological phase in the Kitaev chain maps into conventional order in the Ising model.