Experimental Realization of the bosonic Kitaev-Majorana model

Superconducting quantum circuits (SQC) are a natural platform for quantum simulations of a wide variety of important lattice models, spanning condensed matter to high-energy physics. The varied toolbox of SQC allow the simulation of a variety of phenomena, including topological effects. Recently, McDonald et al proposed one such topological model that they dubbed the bosonic Kitaev-Majorana model. The model is a bosonic analog of the well-known fermionic Kitaev-Majorana model that has garnered great interest recently. Both models consist of a 1D chain connected by a hopping term but also subject to a pairing potential for the resident excitations. While the bosonic model does not reproduce all of the features of the original, it still exhibits a number of interesting topological features, such as chiral transport. Here we implement the bosonic Kitaev-Majorana model using a multimode superconducting parametric cavity. The nodes of the lattice are mapped to frequency modes of the cavity. The complex hopping terms are created by parametric pumping at mode-difference frequencies, while the pairing potential is induced by pumping at mode-sum frequencies. We present results for simulations on small lattices and discuss possibilities for scaling up the lattice size.