Physicists produce symmetry-protected Majorana edge modes on quantum computer
Physicists are using their quantum computers to study a type of particle that is more resistant to environmental disturbances that can degrade quantum calculations.
The Majorana edge modes form as a result of the collective excitation of multiple individual particles, like ocean waves.
Studying physical phenomena and their relationship to underlying symmetries has been the main thrust of physics for hundreds of years.
When running a calculation on a quantum computer, we want the quantum bits in the computer to be in a single, pure quantum state.
When external electric fields or other environmental noise disturb these states by jumbling them up with other states to create undesirable states, it's called decoherence.
Two effective particles would appear at the end of the chain if they were connected in a way like that.
There was a symmetry of the state under this transformation, as one mode looked identical. A minus sign was picked up by another person.
The team conducted a series of studies on the noise resilience of the MEMs after this initial indication of resilience.
It is necessary to measure the states of different number of qubits close to either end of the chain. They found out that its decay time was the same regardless of how many qubits a measurement included.
The measurement involving up to 12 qubits decayed over the same time scale as the measurement of just one qubit.
The collective nature and noise resilience of the MEMs were highlighted by this, contrary to the expectation that larger quantum observables decay faster in the presence of noise.
Mi and Roushan believe that they might be able to use MEMs to enable symmetry protected quantum gates.
This is a promising route to make more robust gates in a quantum processor because their work shows that the MEMs are sensitive to both low-frequency noise and small errors.
The researchers plan to continue to improve the level of protection these MEMs experience, hoping to compete with some of the leading techniques used to fight against decoherence in quantum computers.
A key question for future works is whether these techniques can be extended to achieve the levels of protection comparable to active error-correction codes," Abanin said.