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arXiv:1412.5603 · Physical Review B

Optimal control of Majorana zero modes

Torsten Karzig, Armin Rahmani, Felix von Oppen, Gil Refael

Published May 11, 2015• 55 citations
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Abstract

Requirement of adiabaticity in the process of braiding of Majorana modes presents serious challenges to its practical implementation. The authors explore how to minimize nonadiabatic errors for finite braiding times by finding an optimal protocol for the Majorana movement. They show, counterintuitively, that protocols characterized by sharp transitions between Majorana motion at maximal and minimal velocities may do the trick.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.91.201404

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Requirement of adiabaticity in the process of braiding of Majorana modes presents serious challenges to its practical implementation. The authors explore how to minimize nonadiabatic errors for finite braiding times by finding an optimal protocol for the Majorana movement. They show, counterintuitively, that protocols characterized by sharp transitions between Majorana motion at maximal and minimal velocities may do the trick.
The realization and manipulation of Majorana zero modes have drawn significant attention for their crucial role in enabling topological quantum computation. Conventional approaches to the braiding of Majorana zero modes rely on adiabatic processes. In this work, using a composite 2-Kitaev-chain system accommodating Majorana zero modes as a working example, we propose a nonadiabatic and non-Abelian geometry phase-based protocol to execute operations on these Majorana zero modes. This is possible by locally coupling the edge sites of both quantum chains with an embedded lattice defect, successfully simulating the braiding operation of two Majorana modes in a highly nonadiabatic fashion. To further enhance the robustness against control imperfections, we apply a multiple-pulse composite strategy to our quantum chain setting for second-order protection of the braiding operations. Our proposal can also support the fast and robust realization of the $\ensuremath{\pi}/8$ gate, an essential ingredient for universal quantum computation. This work hence offers a potential pathway toward the nonadiabatic and fault-tolerant control of Majorana zero modes.
In this work we perform real-time simulations for the dynamics of braiding a pair of Majorana zero modes (MZMs) through a quantum dot in a minimal setup of pure one-dimensional realization. We reveal the strong nonadiabatic effect when the dot energy level approaches zero in order to achieve a geometric phase $\ensuremath{\pi}/4$ which is required for a full exchange between the MZMs. Rather than the strategies of nonuniformly manipulating the system according to adiabatic conditions and shortcuts to adiabaticity, we propose and illustrate a more feasible scheme to suppress the nonadiabatic transition, which allows for a full exchange between the Majorana modes.
In topological quantum computing, unitary operations on qubits are performed by adiabatic braiding of non-Abelian quasiparticles, such as Majorana zero modes, and are protected from local environmental perturbations. In the adiabatic regime, with timescales set by the inverse gap of the system, the errors can be made arbitrarily small by performing the process more slowly. To enhance the performance of quantum information processing with Majorana zero modes, we apply the theory of optimal control to the diabatic dynamics of Majorana-based qubits. While we sacrifice complete topological protection, we impose constraints on the optimal protocol to take advantage of the nonlocal nature of topological information and increase the robustness of our gates. By using the Pontryagin's maximum principle, we show that robust equivalent gates to perfect adiabatic braiding can be implemented in finite times through optimal pulses. In our implementation, modifications to the device Hamiltonian are avoided. Focusing on thermally isolated systems, we study the effects of calibration errors and external white and 1/f1/f1/f (pink) noise on Majorana-based gates. While a noise-induced antiadiabatic behavior, where a slower process creates more diabatic excitations, prohibits indefinite enhancement of the robustness of the adiabatic scheme, our fast optimal protocols exhibit remarkable stability to noise and have the potential to significantly enhance the practical performance of Majorana-based information processing.
Adiabatic braiding of Majorana zero modes can be used for topologically protected quantum information processing. While extremely robust to many environmental perturbations, these systems are vulnerable to noise with high-frequency components. Ironically, slower processes needed for adiabaticity allow more noise-induced excitations to accumulate, resulting in an antiadiabatic behavior that limits the precision of Majorana gates if some noise is present. In a recent publication (2017 Phys. Rev. B 96 075158), fast optimal protocols were proposed as a shortcut for implementing the same unitary operation as the adiabatic braiding in a low-energy effective model. These shortcuts sacrifice topological protection in the absence of noise but provide performance gains and remarkable robustness to noise due to the shorter evolution time. Nevertheless, gates optimized for vanishing noise are suboptimal in the presence of noise. If we know the noise strength beforehand, can we design protocols optimized for the existing unavoidable noise, which will effectively correct the noise-induced errors? We address this question in the present paper, focusing on the same low-energy effective model. We find such optimal protocols using simulated-annealing Monte Carlo simulations. The numerically found pulse shapes, which we fully characterize, are in agreement with Pontryagin's minimum principle, which allows us to arbitrarily improve the approximate numerical results (due to discretization and imperfect convergence) and obtain numerically exact optimal protocols. The protocols are bang–bang (sequence of sudden quenches) for vanishing noise, but contain continuous segments in the presence of multiplicative noise due to the nonlinearity of the master equation governing the evolution. We find that such noise-optimized protocols completely eliminate the above-mentioned antiadiabatic behavior. The final error corresponding to these optimal protocols monotonically decreases with the total time (in three different regimes). A liner fit to 1/ τ indicates extrapolation of the cost function to finite value in the limit. However, quadratic and cubic fits are more suggestive of the cost function extrapolating to zero in the limit of infinite time. Our results set the precision limit of the device as a function of the noise strength and total time.
Braiding Majorana zero-modes around each other is a promising route towards topological quantum computing. Yet, two competing maximes emerge when implementing Majorana braiding in real systems: On the one hand, perfect braiding should be conducted adiabatically slowly to avoid non-topological errors. On the other hand, braiding must be conducted fast such that unavoidable decoherence effects introduced by the environment are negligible. This competition results in an intermediate time scale for Majorana braiding that is optimal, but generally not error-free. Here, we calculate this intermediate time scale for a T-junction of short one-dimensional topological superconductors coupled to a bosonic bath that generates fluctuations in the local electric potential, which stem from, e.g., environmental photons or phonons of the substrate. We thereby obtain boundaries for the speed of Majorana braiding with a predetermined gate fidelity. Our results emphasize the general susceptibility of Majorana-based information storage in finite-size systems and can serve as a guide for determining the optimal braiding times in future experiments.
Topological qubits composed of unpaired Majorana zero modes are under intense experimental and theoretical scrutiny in efforts to realize practical quantum computation schemes. In this work, we show that the minimum four Majorana zero modes required for a topological qubit according to braiding schemes and control of entanglement for gate operations are inherent to multiplicative topological phases, which realize symmetry-protected tensor products—and maximally entangled Bell states—of unpaired Majorana zero modes. We construct and characterize both one-dimensional and two-dimensional multiplicative topological phases with two parent Kitaev chain Hamiltonians. We furthermore characterize topology in the bulk and on the boundary with established methods while also introducing techniques to overcome challenges in characterizing multiplicative topology. In the process, we explore the potential of these multiplicative topological phases for an alternative to braiding-based topological quantum computation schemes, in which gate operations are performed through topological phase transitions. Published by the American Physical Society 2024