Robustness of Majorana edge states of short-length Kitaev chains coupled with environment

Abstract: Recently, the two-site Kitaev model hosting Majorana edge states was experimentally realized based on double quantum dots. In this context, we construct two-band effective models describing Majorana edge states of a finite-length Kitaev chain by using the isospectral matrix reduction method. We analytically estimate the robustness of Majorana edge states as a function of model parameters. We also study effects of coupling to an environment based on non-Hermitian Hamiltonians derived from the Lindblad equation. We study three types of dissipation, a local one, an adjacent one and a global one. It is found that the Majorana zero-energy edge states acquire nonzero energy such as $E\propto \pm \left( i\gamma \right) ^{L}$ for the local dissipation, where $\gamma $ is the magnitude of the dissipation and $L$ is the length of the chain. On the other hand, the Majorana zero-energy edge states acquire nonzero energy such as $E\propto \pm i\gamma $ irrespective of the length $L$ for the global dissipation. Hence, the Majorana edge states are robust against the local dissipation but not against the global one. Our results will be useful for future studies on Majorana edge states based on quantum dots.