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Leibniz international proceedings in informatics

Decoherence in Open Majorana Systems

Earl T. Campbell

Published Jan 1, 2015• 5 citations
Publisher

Abstract

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.

DOI
10.4230/lipics.tqc.2015.111

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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.
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.
Coupling to a thermal bath leads to thermalisation and 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 thermalization and 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.
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.
We investigate a system of two interacting qubits having one of them isolated and the other coupled to a thermal reservoir. We consider two different models of system-reservoir interaction: i) a model, in which the master equation is derived taking into account the interaction between the two subsystems (qubits), ii) a naive model, in which the master equation consists of a dissipative term added to the unitary evolution term. We study the dynamics of quantities such as bipartite entanglement, quantum discord and the linear entropy of the isolated qubit for both strong and weak coupling regimes (qubit-qubit interaction) as well as for different temperatures of the reservoir. We find significant disagreements between the results obtained from the two models even in the weak coupling regime. For instance, we show that according to the phenomenological model, the isolated qubit would approach a maximally mixed state more slowly for higher temperatures (unphysical result), while the microscopic model predicts the opposite behaviour (correct result).
We investigate the decoherence patterns of topological qubits in contact with the environment using a novel way of deriving the open system dynamics, rather than using the Feynman–Vernon approach. Each topological qubit is made up of two Majorana modes of a 1D Kitaev chain. These two Majorana modes interact with the environment in an incoherent way which yields peculiar decoherence patterns of the topological qubit. More specifically, we consider the open system dynamics of topological qubits which are weakly coupled to fermionic/bosonic Ohmic-like environments. We find atypical patterns of quantum decoherence. In contrast to the case for non-topological qubits—which always decohere completely in all Ohmic-like environments—topological qubits decohere completely in Ohmic and sub-Ohmic environments but not in super-Ohmic ones. Moreover, we find that the fermion parities of the topological qubits, though they cannot prevent the qubit states from exhibiting decoherence in sub-Ohmic environments, can prevent thermalization turning the state into a Gibbs state. We also study the cases in which each Majorana mode can couple to different Ohmic-like environments, and the time dependence of concurrence for two topological qubits.
Recently there have been numerous proposals to create Majorana zero modes in solid state heterojunctions, superconducting wires, and optical lattices. Putatively the information stored in qubits constructed from these modes is protected from various forms of decoherence. Here we present a generic method to study the effect of external perturbations on these modes. We focus on the case where there are no interactions between different Majorana modes either directly or through intermediary fermions. To quantify the rate of loss of the information stored in the Majorana modes we study the two-time correlators for qubits built from them. We analyze a generic gapped fermionic environment (bath) interacting via tunneling with different components of the qubit (different Majorana modes). We present examples with both static and dynamic perturbations (noise), and using our formalism derive a rate of information loss, for Majorana memories, that depends on the spectral density of both the noise and the fermionic bath.