Destroying a topological quantum bit by condensing Ising vortices

Zhihao Hao (), Stephen Inglis and Roger Melko
Additional contact information
Zhihao Hao: University of Waterloo
Stephen Inglis: University of Waterloo
Roger Melko: University of Waterloo

Nature Communications, 2014, vol. 5, issue 1, 1-6

Abstract: Abstract The imminent realization of topologically protected qubits in fabricated systems will provide not only an elementary implementation of fault-tolerant quantum computing architecture, but also an experimental vehicle for the general study of topological order. The simplest topological qubit harbours what is known as a Z2 liquid phase, which encodes information via a degeneracy depending on the system’s topology. Elementary excitations of the phase are fractionally charged objects called spinons, or Ising flux vortices called visons. At zero temperature, a Z2 liquid is stable under deformations of the Hamiltonian until spinon or vison condensation induces a quantum-phase transition destroying the topological order. Here we use quantum Monte Carlo to study a vison-induced transition from a Z2 liquid to a valence-bond solid in a quantum dimer model on the kagome lattice. Our results indicate that this critical point is beyond the description of the standard Landau paradigm.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms6781 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:5:y:2014:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms6781

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms6781

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().