Exact ground states and topological order in interacting Kitaev/Majorana chains

We study a system of interacting spinless fermions in one dimension that, in the absence of interactions, reduces to the Kitaev chain [Kitaev, Phys. Usp. 44, 131 (2001)]. In the noninteracting case, a signal of topological order appears as zero-energy modes localized near the edges. We show that the exact ground states can be obtained analytically even in the presence of nearest-neighbor repulsive interactions when the on-site (chemical) potential is tuned to a particular function of the other parameters. As with the noninteracting case, the obtained ground states are twofold degenerate and differ in fermionic parity. We prove the uniqueness of the obtained ground states and show that they can be continuously deformed to the ground states of the noninteracting Kitaev chain without gap closing. We also demonstrate explicitly that there exists a set of operators each of which maps one of the ground states to the other with opposite fermionic parity. These operators can be thought of as an interacting generalization of Majorana edge zero modes.