Noise-resilient Majorana Edge Modes on a Chain of Superconducting Qubits

Zijun Chen
Brooks Foxen
Masoud Mohseni
Emily Mount
Joao Basso
Andrew Dunsworth
William J. Huggins
Yuan Su
Markus Rudolf Hoffmann
Alexis Morvan
Guifre Vidal
Bob Benjamin Buckley
Thomas E O'Brien
John Mark Kreikebaum
Rajeev Acharya
Joonho Lee
Shirin Montazeri
Sergei Isakov
Jamie Yao
Rebecca Potter
Jeremy Patterson Hilton
Alexei Kitaev
Alex Crook
Fedor Kostritsa
Kim Ming Lau
Dmitry Abanin
Trent Huang
Steve Habegger
Alexa Rubinov
Vladimir Shvarts
Anthony Megrant
Charles Neill
Dar Gilboa
Nicholas Bushnell
Mike Shearn
Wojtek Mruczkiewicz
Xiao Mi
Frank Carlton Arute
Alejandro Grajales Dau
Yaxing Zhang
Lara Faoro
Justin Thomas Iveland
Marco Szalay
Orion Martin
Juhwan Yoo
Michael Newman
William Giang
Alex Opremcak
William Courtney
Andrey Klots
Wayne Liu
Pavel Laptev
Paul Conner
Vadim Smelyanskiy
Benjamin Chiaro
Bernardo Meurer Costa
Michael Blythe Broughton
Juan Atalaya
Daniel Eppens
Roberto Collins
Igor Aleiner
Yu Chen
Reza Fatemi
Leon Brill
Ashley Anne Huff
Doug Strain
Ebrahim Forati
Dave Landhuis
Kenny Lee
Ping Yeh
Kunal Arya
Michel Henri Devoret
Cody Jones
Edward Farhi
Andre Gregory Petukhov
Alexander Korotkov
Christopher Schuster
Kostyantyn Kechedzhi
Trond Ikdahl Andersen
Alexandre Bourassa
Kannan Aryaperumal Sankaragomathi
Science (2022) (to appear)
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Abstract

Inherent symmetry of a quantum system may protect its otherwise fragile states. Leveraging such protection requires testing its robustness against uncontrolled environmental interactions. Using 47 superconducting qubits, we implement the kicked Ising model which exhibits Majorana edge modes (MEMs) protected by a $\mathbb{Z}_2$-symmetry. Remarkably, we find that any multi-qubit Pauli operator overlapping with the MEMs exhibits a uniform decay rate comparable to single-qubit relaxation rates, irrespective of its size or composition. This finding allows us to accurately reconstruct the exponentially localized spatial profiles of the MEMs. Spectroscopic measurements further indicate exponentially suppressed hybridization between the MEMs over larger system sizes, which manifests as a strong resilience against low-frequency noise. Our work elucidates the noise sensitivity of symmetry-protected edge modes in a solid-state environment.

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