Optimal noise-canceling shortcuts to adiabaticity: application to noisy Majorana-based gates

Adiabatic braiding of Majorana zero modes can be used for topologically protected quantum information processing. While extremely robust to many environmental perturbations, these systems are vulnerable to noise with high-frequency components. Ironically, slower processes needed for adiabaticity allow more noise-induced excitations to accumulate, resulting in an antiadiabatic behavior that limits the precision of Majorana gates if some noise is present. In a recent publication (2017 Phys. Rev. B 96 075158), fast optimal protocols were proposed as a shortcut for implementing the same unitary operation as the adiabatic braiding in a low-energy effective model. These shortcuts sacrifice topological protection in the absence of noise but provide performance gains and remarkable robustness to noise due to the shorter evolution time. Nevertheless, gates optimized for vanishing noise are suboptimal in the presence of noise. If we know the noise strength beforehand, can we design protocols optimized for the existing unavoidable noise, which will effectively correct the noise-induced errors? Weaddress this question in the present paper, focusing on the same low-energy effective model. We find such optimal protocols using simulated-annealing Monte Carlo simulations. The numerically found pulse shapes, which we fully characterize, are in agreement with Pontryagin's minimum principle, which allows us to arbitrarily improve the approximate numerical results (due to discretization and imperfect convergence) and obtain numerically exact optimal protocols. The protocols are bang-bang (sequence of sudden quenches) for vanishing noise, but contain continuous segments in the presence of multiplicative noise due to the nonlinearity of the master equation governing the evolution. We find that such noise-optimized protocols completely eliminate the above-mentioned antiadiabatic behavior. The final error corresponding to these optimal protocols monotonically decreases with the total time (in three different regimes). A liner fit to 1/tau indicates extrapolation of the cost function to finite value in the tau -> infinity limit. However, quadratic and cubic fits are more suggestive of the cost function extrapolating to zero in the limit of infinite time. Our results set the precision limit of the device as a function of the noise strength and total time.