Majorana stabilizer code[1]
Description
A stabilizer code whose stabilizers are products of an even number of Majorana fermion operators, analogous to Pauli strings for a traditional stabilizer code and referred to as Majorana stabilizers. The codespace is the mutual \(+1\) eigenspace of all Majorana stabilizers.
Codes can be denoted as \([[n,k,d]]_{f}\) [2], where \(n\) is the number of fermionic modes (equivalently, \(2n\) Majorana modes). Two copies of an \(n\)-Majorana mode code may be combined to form a single \(n\)-fermion code by using one copy for the real parts of each fermion, and the other copy for the imaginary parts [3]. Codes that admit a logical operator of even (odd) weight are called even (odd) Majorana codes [4]. Even Majorana codes encode logical qubits, and odd Majorana codes have at least one logical Majorana fermion.
In some cases, Majorana-based stabilizer codes are designed to protect against fermionic noise [5] and are thus useful for physical platforms based on fermions. In other cases, Majorana-based frameworks are helpful for understanding conventional qubit stabilizer codes designed for qubit-based platforms.
Protection
Detects products of Majorana operators with weight up to \(d-1\). Physically, protects against dephasing errors caused by coupling of fermion density to the environment and bit-flip errors caused by quasiparticle poisoning processes.
Code bounds have been developed for small codes [6]. LP bounds for Majorana codes have been developed based on the identification of Majorana operators with the Clifford algebra [7].
Encoding
Unitary encoding using fermionic Clifford operations [8].Transversal Gates
Transversal Clifford operations are discussed in Ref. [4].Gates
Some gates can be implemented through braiding of the computational anyons. Circuit-based gates can be converted into braid patterns via quantum compiling algorithms [9].Cousins
- Dual linear code— Classical self-orthogonal codes can be used to construct Majorana stabilizer codes [2,10,11]. The direct relationship between the two codes follows from expressing the Majorana strings as binary vectors – akin to the symplectic representation – and observing that the binary stabilizer matrix \(S\) for such a Majorana stabilizer code satisfies \(S\cdot S^T=0\) because it has commuting stabilizers, which is precisely the condition \(G\cdot G^T=0\) on the generator matrix \(G\) of a self-orthogonal classical code. A self-orthogonal classical code \(C\) with parameters \([2N,k,d]\) yields a Majorana stabilizer code with parameters \([[N,N-k,d^\perp]]_f\), where \(d^\perp\) is the code distance of the dual code \(C^\perp\).
- Qubit CSS code— Every \([[n,k,d]]_f\) Majorana stabilizer code is associated with a \([[2n,2k,d]]\) self-dual qubit CSS code [1; Lemma 2].
- Linear binary code— When constructing a Majorana stabilizer code from a self-orthogonal classical code with an odd number of bits and generator matrix \(G\), a more complex procedure must be applied to ensure that the fermion code has an even number of Majorana zero modes, and thus a physical Hilbert space [1,2]. Rather than taking \(G\) to be the stabilizer matrix as in the even case, we take \(G\oplus G\). This is a concatenation of classical codes as in the CSS construction and it yields a mapping \([2n-1,k,d]\rightarrow [[2n-1,2n-1-k,d^\perp]]_f\). This procedure may be further generalized by concatenating two different self-orthogonal classical codes with an odd number of bits, as is often done in the CSS construction.
- Cyclic linear binary code— Cyclic binary linear codes can be used to construct translation-invariant Majorana stabilizer codes, provided that they are also self-orthogonal [2].
- Stabilizer code— Majorana stabilizer codes are useful for Majorana-based architectures, where the degrees of freedom are electrons, and the notion of locality is different than all other code kingdoms.
- Modular-qudit stabilizer code— Majorana stabilizer codes can be extended to modular qudits, yielding parafermion stabilizer codes [12].
- Jordan-Wigner transformation code— A Majorana stabilizer code is a stabilizer code whose stabilizers are composed of Majorana fermion operators, which are in turn realizable using Pauli strings via the Jordan-Wigner mapping.
- Honeycomb Floquet code— The Honeycomb code admits a convenient representation in terms of Majorana fermions. This leads to a possible physical realization of the code in terms of tetrons [13], where each physical qubit is composed of four Majorana modes.
- Dynamical code— Dynamical codes are viable candidates for storage in Majorana-qubit devices [14].
- Majorana subsystem stabilizer code— Subsystem qubit stabilizer codes have been formulated in terms of Majorana operators [15].
- \([[5,1,3]]\) Five-qubit perfect code— The five-qubit code Hamiltonian is local when expressed in terms of mutually commuting Majorana operators [16].
- Transverse-field Ising model (TFIM) code— The TFIM code stabilizers can be expressed in terms of Majorana operators.
- Quantum parity code (QPC)— QPCs for \(m_1=m_2\) can be conveniantly expressed in terms of mutually commuting Majorana operators [17].
- Pastawski-Yoshida-Harlow-Preskill (HaPPY) code— The pentagon HaPPY code Hamiltonian can be expressed in terms of mutually commuting weight-two (two-body) Majorana operators [18].
Primary Hierarchy
References
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- Aleksander Kubica, private communication, 2019
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Page edit log
- Michael Gullans (2025-01-12) — most recent
- Alexander Schuckert (2025-01-12)
- Victor V. Albert (2025-01-12)
- Victor V. Albert (2022-03-04)
- Victor V. Albert (2021-12-02)
- Chris Fechisin (2021-11-23)
Cite as:
“Majorana stabilizer code”, The Error Correction Zoo (V. V. Albert & P. Faist, eds.), 2025. https://errorcorrectionzoo.org/c/majorana_stab