Strong-coupling topological Josephson effect in quantum wires

We investigate the Josephson effect for a setup with two lattice quantum wires featuring Majorana zero energy boundary modes at the tunnel junction. In the weak-coupling regime, the exact solution reproduces the perturbative result for the energy containing a contribution ∼ ± cos(φ/2) relative to the tunneling of paired Majorana fermions. As the tunnel amplitude g grows relative to the hopping amplitude w, the gap between the energy levels gradually diminishes until it closes completely at the critical value gc=√2w. At this point the Josephson energies have the principal values Emσ=2σ√2w cos [φ/6+2π(m-1)/3], where m =- 1,0,1 and σ =± 1, a result not following from perturbation theory. It represents a transparent regime where three Bogoliubov states merge, leading to additional degeneracies of the topologically nontrivial ground state with an odd number of Majorana fermions at the end of each wire. We also obtain the exact tunnel currents for a fixed parity of the eigenstates. The Josephson current shows the characteristic 4π periodicity expected for a topological Josephson effect. We discuss the additional features of the current associated with a closure of the energy gap between the energy levels. (paper)