Symmetry-protected non-Abelian braiding of Majorana Kramers' pairs

Abstract

We develop the complete theory for non-Abelian braiding of Majorana Kramers' pairs (MKPs) in time-reversal (TR) invariant topological superconductors. By introducing an effective Hamiltonian approach to describe the braiding of MKPs, we show that the non-Abelian braiding is protected when the effective Hamiltonian exhibits a new TR like anti-unitary symmetry, which is satisfied if the system is free of dynamical noise. Importantly, even the dynamical noise may not cause error in braiding, unless the noise correlation function breaks a dynamical TR symmetry, which generalizes the TR symmetry protection of MKPs to dynamical regime. Moreover, the resulted error by noise is shown to be a higher order effect, compared with the decoherence of Majorana qubits without TR symmetry protection. These results show that the non-Abelian braiding of MKPs is observable and may have versatile applications to future quantum computation technologies.