M. S. Scheurer and A. Shnirman

Phys. Rev. B 88, 064515 (2013)

We investigate the nonadiabatic processes occurring during the manipulations of Majorana qubits in one-dimensional semiconducting wires with proximity-induced superconductivity. Majorana qubits are usually protected by the excitation gap. Yet, manipulations performed at a finite pace can introduce both decoherence and renormalization effects. Although exponentially small for slow manipulations, these effects are important as they may constitute the ultimate decoherence mechanism. Moreover, as adiabatic topological manipulations fail to produce a universal set of quantum gates, nonadiabatic manipulations might be necessary to perform quantum computation.