Majorana braiding with thermal noise

TL;DR

This paper studies how thermal noise affects the stability of Majorana-based quantum memories during braiding operations, revealing limitations in their self-correcting capabilities due to error processes.

Contribution

It identifies error mechanisms during Majorana braiding in a trijunction and demonstrates their impact on memory lifetime through Monte Carlo simulations.

Findings

Error processes limit memory lifetime growth with system size

Thermal environment induces dangerous errors during braiding

Self-correction is restricted in this Majorana architecture

Abstract

We investigate the self-correcting properties of a network of Majorana wires, in the form of a trijunction, in contact with a parity-preserving thermal environment. As opposed to the case where Majorana bound states (MBSs) are immobile, braiding MBSs within a trijunction introduces dangerous error processes that we identify. Such errors prevent the lifetime of the memory from increasing with the size of the system. We confirm our predictions with Monte Carlo simulations. Our findings put a restriction on the degree of self-correction of this specific quantum computing architecture.