Discrete time crystals have attracted considerable theoretical and experimental studies but their potential applications have remained unexplored. A particular type of discrete time crystals, termed "Majorana time crystals," is found to emerge in a periodically driven superconducting wire accommodating two different species of topological edge modes. It is further shown that one can manipulate different Majorana edge modes separated in the time lattice, giving rise to an unforeseen scenario for topologically protected gate operations mimicking braiding. The proposed protocol can also generate a magic state that is important for universal quantum computation. This study thus advances the quantum control in discrete time crystals and reveals their great potential arising from their time-domain properties.
Recent discoveries on topological characterization of gapless systems have attracted interest in both theoretical studies and experimental realizations. Examples of such gapless topological phases are Weyl semimetals, which exhibit three-dimensional (3D) Dirac cones (Weyl points), and nodal line semimetals, which are characterized by line nodes (two bands touching along a line). Inspired by our previous discoveries that the kicked Harper model exhibits many fascinating features of Floquet topological phases, in this paper we consider a generalization of the model, where two additional periodic system parameters are introduced into the Hamiltonian to serve as artificial dimensions, so as to simulate a 3D periodically driven system. We observe that by increasing the hopping strength and the kicking strength of the system, many new Floquet band touching points at Floquet quasienergies 0 and π will start to appear. Some of them are Weyl points, while the others form line nodes in the parameter space. By taking open boundary conditions along the physical dimension, edge states analogous to Fermi arcs in static Weyl semimetal systems are observed. Finally, by designing an adiabatic pumping scheme, the chirality of the Floquet-band Weyl points and the π Berry phase around Floquet-band line nodes can be manifested.
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