Physical implementation of a Majorana fermion surface code for fault-tolerant quantum computation

We propose a physical realization of a commuting Hamiltonian of interacting Majorana fermions realizing Z(2) topological order, using an array of Josephson-coupled topological superconductor islands. The required multi-body interaction Hamiltonian is naturally generated by a combination of charging energy induced quantum phase-slips on the superconducting islands and electron tunneling between islands. Our setup improves on a recent proposal for implementing a Majorana fermion surface code (Vijay et al 2015 Phys. Rev. X 5 041038), a 'hybrid' approach to fault-tolerant quantum computation that combines (1) the engineering of a stabilizer Hamiltonian with a topologically ordered ground state with (2) projective stabilizer measurements to implement error correction and a universal set of logical gates. Our hybrid strategy has advantages over the traditional surface code architecture in error suppression and single-step stabilizer measurements, and is widely applicable to implementing stabilizer codes for quantum computation.