Failure of protection of Majorana based qubits against decoherence

Jan Carl Budich, Stefan Walter, Bjoern Trauzettel

Published 2011-11-07, updated 2012-03-15Version 2

Qubit realizations based on Majorana bound states have been considered promising candidates for quantum information processing which is inherently inert to decoherence. We put the underlying general arguments leading to this conjecture to the test from an open quantum system perspective. It turns out that, from a fundamental point of view, the Majorana qubit is as susceptible to decoherence as any local paradigm of a qubit.