Robust Majorana magic gates via measurements

Torsten Karzig, Yuval Oreg, Gil Refael, Michael H. Freedman

Published 2018-12-26Version 1

$\pi/8$ phase gates (magic gates or T-gates) are crucial to augment topological systems based on Majorana zero modes to full quantum universality. We present a scheme based on a combination of projective measurements and non-adiabatic evolution that effectively cancels smooth control errors when implementing phase gates in Majorana-based systems. Previous schemes based on adiabatic evolution are susceptible to problems arising from small but finite dynamical phases that are generically present in topologically unprotected gates. A measurement-only approach eliminates dynamical phases. For non-protected gates, however, forced-measurement schemes are no longer effective which leads to low success probabilities of obtaining the right succession of measurement outcomes in a measurement-only implementation. We show how to obtain a viable measurement-based scheme which dramatically increases the success probabilities by evolving the system non-adiabatically with respect to the degenerate subspace in between measurements. We outline practical applications of our scheme in recently proposed quantum computing designs based on Majorana tetrons and hexons.