Detection and manipulation of Majorana fermions in circuit QED

Abstract

Motivated by recent experimental progress towards the measurement and manipulation of Majorana fermions with superconducting circuits, we propose a device interfacing Majorana fermions with circuit quantum electrodynamics. The proposed circuit acts as a charge parity detector changing the resonance frequency of a superconducting $\ensuremath{\lambda}/4$ resonator conditioned on the parity of charges on nearby gates. Operating at both charge and flux sweet spots, this device is highly insensitive to environmental noise. It enables high-fidelity single-shot quantum nondemolition readout of the state of a pair of Majorana fermions encoding a topologically protected qubit. Additionally, the interaction permits the realization of an arbitrary phase gate on the topological qubit, closing the loop for computational completeness. Away from the charge sweet spot, this device can be used as a highly sensitive charge detector with a sensitivity better than ${10}^{\ensuremath{-}4}\text{e}/\sqrt{\text{Hz}}$ and bandwidth larger than 1 MHz.