Dissipation-Induced Steady States in Topological Superconductors: Mechanisms and Design Principles

Abstract: The search for conditions supporting degenerate steady states in nonequilibrium topological superconductors is important for advancing dissipative quantum engineering, a field that has attracted significant research attention over the past decade. In this study, we address this problem by investigating topological superconductors hosting unpaired Majorana modes under the influence of environmental dissipative fields. Within the Gorini-Kossakowski-Sudarshan-Lindblad framework and the third quantization formalism, we establish a correspondence between equilibrium Majorana zero modes and non-equilibrium kinetic zero modes. We further derive a simple algebraic relation between the numbers of these excitations expressed in terms of hybridization between the single-particle wavefunctions and linear dissipative fields. Based on these findings, we propose a practical recipes how to stabilize degenerate steady states in topological superconductors through controlled dissipation engineering. To demonstrate their applicability, we implement our general framework in the BDI-class Kitaev chain with long-range hopping and pairing terms -- a system known to host a robust edge-localized Majorana modes.