Majorana fermions arising in superconducting nanowires are of interest both for fundamental reasons and due to their potential use as building blocks for a topological quantum computer. While recent experiments have reported strong evidence of Majorana fermions in the form of occupation of a zero-energy fermionic mode, there is still disagreement about whether the observed data can be explained by other mechanisms. Furthermore, to be useful for quantum computation, the fermionic parities of zero-energy modes must be measured with high fidelity. In this thesis, we apply a quantum information protocol known as self-testing to a system of Majorana fermions. A self-testing protocol is a statistical test for certifying a quantum state and a set of measurement operators from experimentally determined expectation values, under minimal physical assumptions. Such a test treats the system as a black-box and relies only on the distributions of measurement outcomes given device settings. For the protocol described in this thesis, if the test is passed, then a set of measurements that ideally are of fermionic parities are certified to have the exact anticommutation relations as determined by the anticommutativity of Majorana fermion operators. The protocol is robust in the sense that bounds on the state and operator fidelities can still be established in the presence of small experimental imperfections. Finally, a rigorous statistical analysis is used to derive a confidence interval for the certified fidelities given a finite experimental data set.
Majorana fermions arising in superconducting nanowires are of interest both for fundamental reasons and due to their potential use as building blocks for a topological quantum computer. While recent experiments have reported strong evidence of Majorana fermions in the form of occupation of a zero-energy fermionic mode, there is still disagreement about whether the observed data can be explained by other mechanisms. Furthermore, to be useful for quantum computation, the fermionic parities of zero-energy modes must be measured with high fidelity. In this thesis, we apply a quantum information protocol known as self-testing to a system of Majorana fermions. A self-testing protocol is a statistical test for certifying a quantum state and a set of measurement operators from experimentally determined expectation values, under minimal physical assumptions. Such a test treats the system as a black-box and relies only on the distributions of measurement outcomes given device settings. For the protocol described in this thesis, if the test is passed, then a set of measurements that ideally are of fermionic parities are certified to have the exact anticommutation relations as determined by the anticommutativity of Majorana fermion operators. The protocol is robust in the sense that bounds on the state and operator fidelities can still be established in the presence of small experimental imperfections. Finally, a rigorous statistical analysis is used to derive a confidence interval for the certified fidelities given a finite experimental data set.
We present a quantum self-testing protocol to certify measurements of fermion parity involving Majorana fermion modes. We show that observing a set of ideal measurement statistics implies anticommutativity of the implemented Majorana fermion parity operators, a necessary prerequisite for Majorana detection. Our protocol is robust to experimental errors. We obtain lower bounds on the fidelities of the state and measurement operators that are linear in the errors. We propose to analyze experimental outcomes in terms of a contextuality witness W, which satisfies $\ensuremath{\langle}W\ensuremath{\rangle}\ensuremath{\le}3$ for any classical probabilistic model of the data. A violation of the inequality witnesses quantum contextuality, and the closeness to the maximum ideal value $\ensuremath{\langle}W\ensuremath{\rangle}=5$ indicates the degree of confidence in the detection of Majorana fermions.
In a recent breakthrough experiment [Nature (London) 614, 445 (2023)], signatures of Majorana zero modes have been observed in tunnel spectroscopy for a minimal Kitaev chain constructed from coupled quantum dots. However, as Ising anyons, Majoranas' most fundamental property of non-Abelian statistics is yet to be detected. Moreover, the minimal Kitaev chain is qualitatively different from topological superconductors in that it supports Majoranas only at a sweet spot. Therefore, it is not obvious whether non-Abelian characteristics such as braiding and fusion can be demonstrated in this platform with a reasonable level of robustness. In this work, we theoretically propose a protocol for detecting the Majorana fusion rules in an artificial Kitaev chain consisting of four quantum dots. In contrast with the previous proposals for semiconductor-superconductor hybrid nanowire platforms, here we do not rely on mesoscopic superconducting islands, which are difficult to implement in quantum dot chains. To show the robustness of the fusion protocol, we discuss the effects of three types of realistic imperfections on the fusion outcomes, e.g., diabatic errors, dephasing errors, and calibration errors. We also propose a fermion parity readout scheme using quantum capacitance. Our work will shed light on future experiments on detecting the non-Abelian properties of Majorana modes in a quantum dot chain.
Quantum computers are devices that can solve certain problems faster than ordinary, classical computers. The fundamental units of quantum information are qubits, superpositions of two states, a "zero" state and a "one" state. There are various approaches to construct such two-level systems, among others, using superconducting circuits, trapped ions or photons. A common feature of these physical systems is that their coherence times are relatively short compared to the length of useful computations. Superconducting qubits, for instance, are currently the most advanced solid-state qubits, but they decohere after around 100 microseconds, and any information stored in these qubits is lost. On the other hand, useful quantum computations may require quantum information to survive on time scales that are many orders of magnitude longer, as their runtimes can reach several hours or even days. Topological quantum computing is an approach to construct qubits that survive for the entire duration of such a long computation. Topological quantum computing comes in two flavors. The condensed matter approach is to build error-resilient qubits using exotic quasiparticles in topological materials, most prominently Majorana zero modes in topological superconductors. Even though no such qubit has been built to date, the hope is that their coherence times may be significantly longer than the coherence times of currently available solid-state qubits, but are still expected to be too short for large-scale quantum computing. The quantum information approach is to combine many error-prone qubits to build more robust logical qubits using topological error-correcting codes, e.g., surface codes. Even though the first approach is hardware-based and the second approach is software-based, they are deeply related. With Majorana-based qubits, the main logical operations are Majorana fermion parity measurements. By replacing Majorana-based qubits with surface-code patches and parity measurements with lattice-surgery operations, schemes for quantum computation with Majorana-based qubits or with surface codes can be identical. In this thesis, we explore how to construct a large-scale topological fault-tolerant quantum computer that can perform useful quantum computations. Here, topological refers to the nature of the quantum error-correcting code, while the underlying hardware may be based on non-topological qubits, but could also be composed of Majorana-based qubits. We provide a complete picture of such a large-scale device, breaking down large quantum computations into logical qubits and logical operations, describing how these logical operations are performed on the level of physical qubits and physical gates, and finally discussing how these physical qubits can be pieced together in a Majorana-based system using topological superconducting nanowires.
Majorana zero modes are emergent zero-energy quasiparticle excitations in certain superconducting systems that can be viewed as fractionalized or “half” electrons. These quasiparticles obey non-Abelian braiding statistics which is one manifestation of such half-electron character. Due to such non-Abelian braiding property, Majorana zero mode pairs hold promise as potential qubits for topological quantum computation. It is somewhat surprising that, at least theoretically, ordinary one-dimensional semiconductor systems can be induced to host such esoteric Majorana modes as edge states if some precise experimental conditions are satisfied. Because of the relative simplicity of material and experimental requirements to host Majorana modes, there has been a flurry of experimental effort to realize them in semiconductor nanowire systems. While experimental efforts have produced preliminary evidence for the presence of Majorana zero modes in these systems, a thorough confirmation is lacking. The experimental signature in question is the presence of a zero-bias conductance-peak that, while necessary, is not a sufficient criterion to establish the presence of underlying Majorana modes. Given the importance of Majorana braiding for topological quantum computation and skepticism over the presence of Majorana modes in these experimental systems, it would seem natural to attempt braiding these putative Majorana modes in the near future. In that case, an observation of non-Abelian statistics would provide the necessary and sufficient condition in favor of Majorana presence in the studied experimental systems. This thesis has three distinct parts. First, we assume perfect Majorana modes as given that can be successfully braided. In this case, we calculate the diabatic error due to the finite speed of braiding when the system is coupled to a Bosonic bath. Next, we grant that the mechanism for zero-bias conductance-peak is indeed topological, albeit the underlying Majorana modes may be imperfect (the modes are not precisely at zero energy). We study the interplay of dissipation and finite energy splitting of the Majorana modes and study its consequence regarding the probability of successful braiding. Lastly, we propose studying the correlation between independent left and right conductance measurements as a means to distinguish between a topological versus a non-topological the mechanism underlying the observed zero-bias conductance-peak.
Bell inequalities provide a fundamental tool for probing nonlocal correlations, yet their quantum bound, that is, the maximal value attainable through quantum strategies, is rarely accessible analytically. In this work, we introduce a general construction of Bell inequalities for which this bound can be computed exactly. Our framework generalizes both the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt and Gisin's elegant inequalities, yielding Bell expressions maximally violated by any number of pairwise anticommuting Clifford observables together with the corresponding maximally entangled state. Under suitable assumptions, our inequalities also enable the device-independent certification of Majorana fermions, understood as multiqubit realizations of Clifford algebra generators. Importantly, we identify an additional equivalence that must be incorporated into the definition of self-testing beyond invariance under local isometries and transposition. This equivalence arises from partial transposition applied to the shared state and to the measurements, which in specific cases leaves all observed correlations unchanged.
Braiding of Majorana fermions gives accurate topological quantum operations that are intrinsically robust to noise and imperfection, providing a natural method to realize fault-tolerant quantum information processing. Unfortunately, it is known that braiding of Majorana fermions is not sufficient for the implementation of universal quantum computation. Here we show that topological manipulation of Majorana fermions provides the full set of operations required to generate random numbers by way of quantum mechanics and to certify its genuine randomness through violation of a multipartite Bell inequality. The result opens a perspective to apply Majorana fermions for the robust generation of certified random numbers, which has important applications in cryptography and other related areas.