Simulating spectroscopic detection of Majorana zero modes with a superconducting quantum computer

Abstract

There is currently great interest in near-term applications of quantum computers as well as topological phenomena such as Majorana zero modes that arise from electron interactions in strongly-correlated materials. Here we present a novel spectroscopic algorithm that determines the spectrum of the time-evolved Hamiltonian by measuring a "probe" qubit coupled to a register of simulation qubits and apply it to study the topological phase boundary of an interacting Kitaev chain. We implement our algorithm within the open source Qiskit framework and verify the results experimentally on a cloud-based superconducting IBM Quantum backend.