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  • Letter
  • Open Access

Super-Poissonian noise from quasiparticle poisoning in electron transport through a pair of Majorana bound states

Florinda Viñas Boström

Patrik Recher

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Phys. Rev. B 111, L241405 – Published 27 June, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/m3gq-x86z

Abstract

Topological qubits based on non-Abelian Majorana bound states (MBSs) are protected by parity which is challenged by quasiparticle poisoning (QPP). In this work, we show how QPP affects transport through a pair of coupled MBSs weakly connected to two current leads, using an open system approach and full counting statistics. We find that the correct low-energy physics requires one to include next to leading order tunneling events in the coupling to the leads. In particular, our results show that QPP causes super-Poissonian local shot noise with a Fano factor that diverges with decreasing bias voltage, while the current and the nonlocal (cross) noise are only little affected. We explain that these features are a direct consequence of the nature of MBSs being their own antiparticle making noise measurements a viable tool to search for MBSs in the presence of QPP.

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Phys. Rev. B 111, L241405– Published 27 June, 2025
  • Received 7 September 2024
  • Revised 9 June 2025
  • Accepted 11 June 2025
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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