Emergence of synthetic twist defects in the surface code under local perturbation

TL;DR

This paper investigates the spectral properties of synthetic twist defects in the surface code under local perturbations, providing new representations and numerical analysis to understand their emergence and phase transitions.

Contribution

It introduces two alternative representations of synthetic defects in spin and Majorana languages, simplifying the spectral analysis and identifying phase transition points.

Findings

Constructed and simplified models for synthetic defects.

Numerical results indicating the location of quantum phase transitions.

Established connections to Kitaev's Majorana chain.

Abstract

Topologically-ordered quantum states with Abelian excitations can host defects that obey effective non-Abelian statistics, in principle allowing for quantum information processing via defect braiding. These extrinsic defects (or twists) are typically studied as static features of the lattice. However, an alternative proposal considers how an underlying topologically ordered quantum substrate can be locally perturbed to create and manipulate synthetic defects \cite{you_synthetic_2013}. Unfortunately, while largely referenced, elements of this proposal were never systematically studied. Understanding the energy spectrum is particularly important in finite size and finitely perturbed systems, which are crucial for experimental realizations. In this work we announce a significant step in this direction by explicitly constructing, simplifying, and numerically studying the spectral properties of synthetic defects in a model system. First, we introduce two alternative representations of this problem in both spin and Majorana languages. In the former we describe emergent virtual symmetries which constrain and simplify the problem and in the latter we show a direct connection to Kitaev's well-known Majorana chain. We utilize these simplifications to perform numerical calculations to indicate the location of the quantum phase transition driving the emergence of the synthetic defects. We conclude by discussing key steps for future work to more clearly and completely study this phenomena.