A simple electronic ladder model harboring $\mathbb{Z}_4$ parafermions

Abstract: Parafermions are anyons with the potential for realizing non-local qubits that are resilient to local perturbations. Compared to Majorana zero modes, braiding of parafermions implements an extended set of topologically protected quantum gates. This, however, comes at the price that parafermionic zero modes can not be realized in the absence of strong interactions whose theoretical description is challenging. In the present work, we construct a simple lattice model for interacting spinful electrons with parafermionic zero energy modes. The explicit microscopic nature of the considered model highlights new realization avenues for these exotic excitations in recently fabricated quantum dot arrays. By density matrix renormalization group calculations, we identify a broad range of parameters, with well-localized zero modes, whose parafermionic nature is substantiated by their unique $8\pi$ periodic Josephson spectrum.