Chiral transport and localization in a bosonic analogue of the Kitaev-Majorana chain

We study a bosonic system whose real-space Hamiltonian has a form analogous to the celebrated Kitaev chain model of a 1D p-wave superconductor [1]. The system is a 1D chain of non-interacting bosonic cavities which are subject to nearest-neighbour parametric driving. With a suitable choice of drive phases, the system has a number remarkable properties. It exhibits phase dependent chirality: photons propagate and are amplified in a direction that is determined by the phase of the initial drive or excitation. Further, we find a extreme sensitivity to boundary conditions which could serve as a potential quantum sensor. We show that many of these properties can be connected to the dynamics and topology of effective non-Hermitian models (despite our system being fully Hermitian). Our model could be realized in several different superconducting microwave circuits setups (e.g. [2,3]) or silicon photonic platforms (e.g. [4]).

[1] A. McDonald, T. Pereg-Barnea, A.A. Clerk, arXiV:1805.12557
[2] B. Abdo, A. Kamal, and M. Devoret, Phys. Rev. B 87, 12 014508 (2013)
[3] N. E. Frattini, U. Vool, S. Shankar, A. Narla, K. M. Sliwa, and M. H. Devoret, Appl. Phys. Lett. 110, 222603 (2017)
[4] S. Mittal, E. A. Goldschmidt, and M. Hafezi, Nature 561, 502506 (2018).