English

Charge response of the Majorana toric code

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2018-01-23 v3 Quantum Physics

Abstract

At zero temperature, a two dimensional lattice of Majorana zero modes on mesoscopic superconducting islands has a topologically ordered toric code phase. Recently, a Landau field theory has been proposed for the system that captures its different phases and the associated phase-transitions. It was shown that with the increase of Josephson tunneling between the islands, a continuous symmetry-breaking 3D-XY transition gets transformed into a discrete symmetry-breaking 3D-Ising transition through a couple of tricritical points and first order transitions. Using the proposed field theory, we analyze the charge-response of the system at the different continuous phase-transitions. We calculate the universal conductivity at the 3D-XY transitions and the change in the superconducting density at the Ising transition using 1/N expansion. Furthermore, by computing a one-loop correction to the field theory, we show that an additional tricritical point is likely to be present in the phase-diagram. Finally, we provide a mean-field calculation that supports the earlier proposed field theory.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1710.04168,
  title  = {Charge response of the Majorana toric code},
  author = {Ananda Roy and Fabian Hassler},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.04168},
  year   = {2018}
}

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Published version

R2 v1 2026-06-22T22:10:30.540Z