Density Of States For the Kitaev Chain

July 8, 2016
In this pdf, we plot the Density Of States for a Kitaev Chain with 100
fermionic sites.
The related Hamiltonian in the fermionic basis, given as:
H=

X
j

1
(w(aj aj+1 + aj+1 aj ) (aj aj ) + aj aj+1 + aj aj+1 )
2

can be rewritten in terms of Majorana operators in the form:

X
H = i/2
[c2j1 c2j + (w + ||)c2j c2j+1 + (w + ||)c2j1 c2j+2 ]

(1)

(2)

The resulting 200X200 matrix in the Majorana basis has the form:

0
(w + ||)
0
0...

0
(w + ||)
0
0
0...

0
(w + ||)
0

0
(w + ||) . . .
H=

(w ||)

0
(w + ||)
0...

..
..
..
..
..
..
.
.
.
.
.
.
We verify the division of parameter space of the Hamiltonian into two parts
one of which exhibits Majorana Zero Modes i.e when 2w > ||. When |2w| < ||,
the Hamiltonian does not contain unpaired Majorana fermions and zero modes
are non-existent.
We start with the values = 10, w = 4 and || = 3 and serially increase
the value of w by 0.5 and plot the resulting five histograms which depict the
density of states.

As expected, there are no Majorana Zero Modes when = 10, w = 4 and

|| = 3.

A similar case is exhibited by = 10, w = 4.5 and || = 3.

The critical point, where 2w = || = 10 does exhibit Majorana zero modes

as is found.

As expected we can clearly see the zero modes when w = 5.5and = 10.

For w = 6 and = 10, we get: