Statistical Mechanics and Symmetries of Non-Abelian Anyon Proliferation: From Deformation to Decoherence (opens in new tab)

Topological quantum computation relies on braiding non-Abelian anyons, but requires the underlying topological order to survive imperfect state preparation and environmental noise. We show that the instability of topological order to wavefunction deformations and to decoherence, with the latter probed by syndrome distributions, are generically captured by stat-mech models whose symmetries naturally expose the corrupting anyonic excitations. As a...