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arXiv:2510.07893 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Decoherence of Majorana zero modes mediated by gapless fermions

Sauri Bhattacharyya, M. Grilli, Bernard van Heck

Published Dec 30, 2025• 1 citation
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We study the decoherence of a collection of Majorana zero modes weakly coupled to a gapless reservoir of non-interacting fermions. Using the Born-Markov approximation, we derive a Lindblad master equation for the dissipative dynamics of the Majorana zero modes. Due to the long-range coupling between Majorana zero modes mediated by the gapless reservoir, the Lindblad jump operators are non-local linear combinations of the Majorana operators. We show that, as a consequence, the dissipative dynamics can exhibit long relaxation times, i.e. a slow decay of fermion parities. A spectral analysis of the Liouvillian shows that the slow-down is suppressed as a power law of the distance between Majorana zero modes. Finally, we validate the Lindblad equation by comparison with unbiased numerical simulations of the time evolution of the full density matrix. In particular, these illustrate that non-Markovian dynamics establishes non-local correlations at small times.

DOI
10.1103/hfkz-jptt

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We study the decoherence of a collection of Majorana zero modes weakly coupled to a gapless reservoir of non-interacting fermions. Using the Born-Markov approximation, we derive a Lindblad master equation for the dissipative dynamics of the Majorana zero modes. Due to the long-range coupling between Majorana zero modes mediated by the gapless reservoir, the Lindblad jump operators are non-local linear combinations of the Majorana operators. We show that, as a consequence, the dissipative dynamics can exhibit long relaxation times, i.e. a slow decay of fermion parities. A spectral analysis of the Liouvillian shows that the slow-down is suppressed as a power law of the distance between Majorana zero modes. Finally, we validate the Lindblad equation by comparison with unbiased numerical simulations of the time evolution of the full density matrix. In particular, these illustrate that non-Markovian dynamics establishes non-local correlations at small times.
In this paper, we use the exact master equation approach to investigate the decoherence dynamics of Majorana zero modes in the Kitaev model, a 1D pp\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}p-wave spinless topological superconducting chain (TSC) that is disturbed by gate-induced charge fluctuations. The exact master equation is derived by extending Feynman-Vernon influence functional technique to fermionic open systems involving pairing excitations. We obtain the exact master equation for the zero-energy Bogoliubov quasiparticle (bogoliubon) in the TSC, and then transfer it into the master equation for the Majorana zero modes. Within this exact master equation formalism, we can describe in detail the non-Markovian decoherence dynamics of the zero-energy bogoliubon as well as Majorana zero modes under local perturbations. We find that at zero temperature, local charge fluctuations induce level broadening to one of the Majorana zero modes but there is an isolated peak (localized bound state) located at zero energy that partially protects the Majorana zero mode from decoherence. At finite temperatures, the zero-energy localized bound state does not precisely exist, but the coherence of the Majorana zero mode can still be partially but weakly protected, due to the sharp dip of the spectral density near the zero frequency. The decoherence will be enhanced as one increases the charge fluctuations and/or the temperature of the gate.
We propose the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev Lindbladian as a paradigmatic solvable model of dissipative many-body quantum chaos.It describes N strongly coupled Majorana fermions with random all-to-all interactions, with unitary evolution given by a quartic Hamiltonian and the coupling to the environment described by M quadratic jump operators, rendering the full Lindbladian quartic in the Majorana operators.Analytical progress is possible by developing a dynamical mean-field theory for the Liouvillian time evolution on the Keldysh contour.By disorder-averaging the interactions, we derive an (exact) effective action for two collective fields (Green's function and self-energy).In the large-N, large-M limit, we obtain the saddle-point equations satisfied by the collective fields, which determine the typical timescales of the dissipative evolution, particularly the spectral gap that rules the relaxation of the system to its steady state.We solve the saddle-point equations numerically and find that, for strong or intermediate dissipation, the system relaxes exponentially, with a spectral gap that can be computed analytically, while for weak dissipation, there are oscillatory corrections to the exponential relaxation.In this letter, we illustrate the feasibility of analytical calculations in strongly correlated dissipative quantum matter.
We study the open quantum dynamics of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model described by the Lindblad master equation, where the SYK model is coupled to Markovian reservoirs with jump operators that are either linear or quadratic in the Majorana fermion operators. Of particular interest for us is the time evolution of the dissipative form factor, which quantifies the average overlap between the initial and time-evolved density matrices as an open quantum generalization of the Loschmidt echo. We find that the dissipative form factor exhibits dynamical quantum phase transitions. We analytically demonstrate a discontinuous dynamical phase transition in the limit of a large number of fermion flavors, which is formally akin to the thermal phase transition in the two-coupled SYK model between the black-hole and wormhole phases. We also find continuous dynamical phase transitions that do not have counterparts in the two-coupled SYK model. While the phase transitions are sharp in the limit of a large number of fermion flavors, their qualitative signatures are present even for a finite number of fermion flavors, as we show numerically.
We study dissipative translationally-invariant free fermionic theories with quadratic Liouvillians. Using a Lie-algebraic approach we solve the Lindblad equation and find explicitly the density matrix at all times for arbitrary time dependence of the Liouvillian. We then investigate the Liouvillian spectral properties and derive a generic criterion for the closure of the dissipative gap, which is believed to be linked with nonequilibrium dissipative phase transitions. We illustrate our findings with a few exotic examples. Particularly, we show the presence of gapless modes with a linear spectrum for fermions with a long-range hopping, which might be related to non-unitary conformal field theories. The predicted effects can be probed in experiments with ultracold atomic and quantum-optical systems using currently available experimental facilities.
In recent years, the reassessment of quantum physical phenomena under the framework of resource theories has triggered the design of novel quantum technologies that take advantage from quantum resources, such as entanglement and quantum coherence. Bearing this in mind, in this work we study the dynamics of quantum resources for two solid-state fermionic quantum devices: (i) a system composed by a pair of Majorana fermions and (ii) another comprising a pair of regular fermions. In both systems, the fermionic species are coupled to a single-level quantum dot. From the interaction of these tripartite systems with a dissipative reservoir, we were able to characterize the dynamics of the devices for some initial states. By employing a time-nonlocal master-equation approach, we obtain the evolution for fermionic occupations, quantum correlations, and quantum coherences in both the Markovian and non-Markovian dissipating regimes. We investigate the interconversion of local coherence and bipartite correlations for the marginal states in each device. While the dynamics of the entanglement and quantum coherence depend quite strongly on the temperature of the reservoir for regular fermions, we found these evolutions are qualitatively similar for the case of Majorana bound states regardless of temperature. Our results illustrate the use of quantum information-theoretic measures to characterize the role of quantum resources in fermion systems.
Coupling to a thermal bath leads to decoherence of stored quantum information. For a system of Gaussian fermions, the fermionic analog of linear or Gaussian optics, these dynamics can be elegantly and efficiently described by evolution of the system's covariance matrix. Taking both system and bath to be Gaussian fermionic, we observe that decoherence occurs at a rate that is independent of the bath temperature. Furthermore, we also consider a weak coupling regime where the dynamics are Markovian. We present a microscopic derivation of Markovian master equations entirely in the language of covariance matrices, where temperature independence remains manifest. This is radically different from behaviour seen in other scenarios, such as when fermions interact with a bosonic bath. Our analysis applies to many Majorana fermion systems that have been heralded as very robust, topologically protected, qubits. In these systems, it has been claimed that thermal decoherence can be exponentially suppressed by reducing temperature, but we find Gaussian decoherence cannot be cooled away.