Non-Hermiticity-stabilized Majorana zero modes in semiconductor-superconductor nanowires

Coupled Majorana zero modes with nonzero energies are generally detrimental to the non-Abelian statistics due to the additional dynamic phase. Nevertheless, we show that a well-connected lead can introduce a local non-Hermitian dissipation term to shift the energies of both coupled Majorana modes to zero, and surprisingly turn the coupled Majorana mode far from the lead into a dark Majorana mode with exponentially small dissipation. This dark Majorana mode can conquer the drawback of the partially overlapped Majorana zero modes and possess the properties of true Majorana zero mode such as the perfect fractional Josephson effect and the non-Abelian statistics.