Cavity-control of Majorana bound states in superconductor-semiconductor heterostructures

Abstract

We theoretically study a hybrid superconductor-semiconductor platform hosting Majorana bound states coupled to a single mode photonic cavity. Starting with a one-dimensional wire coupled to a bulk $s$-wave superconductor embedded in a photonic cavity, we derive an effective light-matter Hamiltonian for such a platform. Assuming that the photonic vector potential is aligned along the tunneling between a wire and a superconductor, we find that the cavity coupling enters only in the effective superconducting pairing term. By solving the coupled electron-photon Hamiltonian using different approaches, such as exact diagonalization in case of zero or large number of photons, high-frequency expansion, and mean-field decoupling, we find that the phase boundary between the topological trivial phases is shifted to smaller values of the Zeeman energy compared to the uncoupled case. Cavity embedding has the strongest effect on the phase diagram in the semiclassical regime, corresponding to a large number of photons. In all cases, we find that at large values of the light-matter coupling strength the effective superconducting pairing is suppressed, driving the system into the gapless phase. We demonstrate that even small light-matter coupling strength allows for entering the topological phase at values of the Zeeman energy compared to the uncoupled platform.