Number conserving analysis of measurement-based braiding with Majorana zero modes

TL;DR

This paper develops a particle-number conserving framework to analyze measurement-based Majorana braiding, confirming topological protection against quantum phase fluctuations, which supports the robustness of Majorana-based quantum computing.

Contribution

It introduces a number-conserving approach to study Majorana braiding, addressing non-universal errors and confirming topological protection in charge-protected schemes.

Findings

Braiding transformations are topologically protected.

Quantum phase fluctuations do not compromise braiding in charge-protected schemes.

The approach accounts for non-universal corrections to Majorana braiding.

Abstract

Majorana-based quantum computation seeks to encode information non-locally in pairs of Majorana zero modes, thereby isolating qubit states from a local noisy environment. In addition to long coherence times, the attractiveness of Majorana-based quantum computing relies on achieving topologically protected Clifford gates from braiding operations. Recent works have conjectured that mean-field BCS calculations may fail to account for non-universal corrections to the Majorana braiding operations. Such errors would be detrimental to Majorana-based topological quantum computing schemes. In this work, we develop a particle-number conserving approach for measurement-based topological quantum computing and investigate the effect of quantum phase fluctuations. We demonstrate that braiding transformations are indeed topologically protected in charge-protected Majorana-based quantum computing schemes.