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

Abstract

In the context of slow quenching dynamics of a $p$-wave superconducting chain, it has been shown that a Majorana edge state can not 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, that breaks the extended 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 non-zero probability that an edge Majorana 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, that 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.