Microwave-controlled coupling of Majorana bound states

Abstract

We propose microwave-controlled rotations for qubits realized as Majorana bound states. To this end we study an inhomogeneous Kitaev chain in a microwave cavity. The chain consists of two topologically nontrivial regions separated by a topologically trivial, gapped region. The Majorana bound states at the interfaces between the left (right) regions and the central region are coupled, and their energies are split by virtual cotunneling processes. The amplitude for these cotunneling processes decreases exponentially in the number of sites of the gapped region, and the decay length diverges as the gap of the topologically trivial region closes. We demonstrate that microwave radiation can exponentially enhance the coupling between the Majorana bound states, both for classical and quantized electric fields. By solving the appropriate Liouville equation numerically we show that microwaves can drive Rabi oscillations in the Majorana sector. Our model emerges as an effective description for a topological semiconductor nanowire in a microwave cavity. Thus, our proposal provides an experimentally feasible way to obtain full single-qubit control necessary for universal quantum computation with Majorana qubits.

14 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (10)

• Non-Abelian Anyons and Topological Quantum Computation
• Signatures of Majorana fermions in hybrid superconductor-semiconductor nanowire devices
• Majorana Fermions and a Topological Phase Transition in Semiconductor-Superconductor Heterostructures
• Evidence of Majorana fermions in an Al - InAs nanowire topological superconductor
• Observation of Majorana Fermions in a Nb-InSb Nanowire-Nb Hybrid Quantum Device
• Introduction to topological superconductivity and Majorana fermions
• Topological Phases of Noncentrosymmetric Superconductors: Edge States, Majorana Fermions, and the Non-Abelian Statistics
• Observing Majorana Bound States in p-wave Superconductors Using Noise Measurements in Tunneling Experiments
• Exotic and excited-state radiative transitions in charmonium from lattice QCD
• Majorana qubit rotations in microwave cavities

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Effects of interactions on periodically driven dynamically localized systems
• Direct cavity detection of Majorana pairs
• Degeneracy lifting of Majorana bound states due to electron-phonon interactions
• Microwave readout of Majorana qubits
• Effects of local periodic driving on transport and generation of bound states
• Floquet engineering of edge states in the presence of staggered potential and interactions
• Electron-photon coupling in Mesoscopic Quantum Electrodynamics