Majorana braiding with thermal noise

Fabio L. Pedrocchi, David P. DiVincenzo

Published 2015-05-14Version 1

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 Majoranas are immobile, braiding Majoranas 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 fundamental restriction on the feasibility of this specific quantum computing architecture.