No Arabic abstract
The recent progress of the Majorana experiments paves a way for the future tests of non-abelian braiding statistics and topologically-protected quantum information processing. However, a deficient design in those tests could be very dangerous and reach false-positive conclusions. A careful theoretical analysis is necessary in order to develop loophole-free tests. We introduce a series of classical hidden variable models to capture certain key properties of Majorana system: non-locality, topologically non-triviality, and quantum interference. Those models could help us to classify the Majorana properties and to set up the boundaries and limitations of Majorana non-abelian tests: fusion tests, braiding tests and test set with joint measurements. We find a hierarchy among those Majorana tests with increasing experimental complexity.
Bell inequalities or Bell-like experiments are supposed to test hidden variable theories based on three intuitive assumptions: determinism, locality and measurement independence. If one of the assumptions of Bell inequality is properly relaxed, the probability distribution of the singlet state, for example, can be reproduced by a hidden variable model. Models that deal with the relaxation of some condition above, with more than one hidden variable, have been studied in the literature nowadays. In this work the relation between the number of hidden variables and the degree of relaxation necessary to reproduce the singlet correlations is investigated. For the examples studied, it is shown that the increase of the number of hidden variables does not allow for more efficiency in the reproduction of quantum correlations.
Topological systems, such as fractional quantum Hall liquids, promise to successfully combat environmental decoherence while performing quantum computation. These highly correlated systems can support non-Abelian anyonic quasiparticles that can encode exotic entangled states. To reveal the non-local character of these encoded states we demonstrate the violation of suitable Bell inequalities. We provide an explicit recipe for the preparation, manipulation and measurement of the desired correlations for a large class of topological models. This proposal gives an operational measure of non-locality for anyonic states and it opens up the possibility to violate the Bell inequalities in quantum Hall liquids or spin lattices.
Bipartite entanglement entropies, calculated from the reduced density matrix of a subsystem, provide a description of the resources available within a system for performing quantum information processing. However, these quantities are not uniquely defined on a system of non-Abelian anyons. This paper describes how reduced density matrices and bipartite entanglement entropies (such as the von Neumann and Renyi entropies) may be constructed for non-Abelian anyonic systems, in ways which reduce to the conventional definitions for systems with only local degrees of freedom.
One implication of Bells theorem is that there cannot in general be hidden variable models for quantum mechanics that both are noncontextual and retain the structure of a classical probability space. Thus, some hidden variable programs aim to retain noncontextuality at the cost of using a generalization of the Kolmogorov probability axioms. We generalize a theorem of Feintzeig (2015) to show that such programs are committed to the existence of a finite null cover for some quantum mechanical experiments, i.e., a finite collection of probability zero events whose disjunction exhausts the space of experimental possibilities.
A single unit cell contains all the information about the bulk system, including the topological feature. The topological invariant can be extracted from a finite system, which consists of several unit cells under certain environment, such as a non-Hermitian external field. We investigate a non- Hermitian finite-size Kitaev chain with PT-symmetric chemical potentials. Exact solution at the symmetric point shows that Majorana edge modes can emerge as the coalescing states at exceptional points and PT symmetry breaking states. The coalescing zero mode is the finite-size projection of the conventional degenerate zero modes in a Hermitian infinite system with the open boundary condition. It indicates a variant of the bulk-edge correspondence: The number of Majorana edge modes in a finite non-Hermitian system can be the topological invariant to identify the topological phase of the corresponding bulk Hermitian system.