New paper in Nature Communications on exchanging Majorana zero modes

Nature Communications 7, Article number: 13194 (2016)

Experimental Simulation of the Exchange of Majorana Zero Modes

Majorana zero modes are an eagerly anticipated resource for quantum information processing as they offer immunity to noise, but they are difficult to create and control experimentally. In collaboration with theorists and experimentalists from Hefei University of Science and Technology in China, Dr Jiannis Pachos from the Theoretical Physics Group in Leeds demonstrated in a recent publication in Nature Communications a fundamental property of Majorana fermions: their non-trivial statistics. This was performed with a quantum simulation of a superconducting chain with linear optics. This system provided the degree of controllability that enabled the manipulation of Majorana quasiparticles and the demonstration of their anyonic statistics. A popular version of the article has been published in 2Physics.