Charge-$4e$ superconductor with parafermionic vortices: A path to universal topological quantum computation

Topological superconductors (TSCs) provide a promising route to fault-tolerant quantum information processing. However, the canonical Majorana platform based on $2e$ TSCs remains computationally constrained. In this work, we find a $4e$ TSC that overcomes these constraints by combining a charge-$4e$ condensate with an Abelian chiral $\mathbb{Z}_3$ topological order in an intertwined fashion. Remarkably, this $4e$ TSC can be obtained by proliferating vortex-antivortex pairs in a stack of two $2e$ $p+ip$ TSCs, or by melting a $ν=2/3$ quantum Hall state. Specific to this TSC, the $hc/(4e)$ fluxes act as charge-conjugation defects in the topological order, whose braiding with anyons transmutes anyons into their antiparticles. This symmetry enrichment leads to $\mathbb{Z}_3$ parafermion zero modes trapped in the elementary vortex cores, which naturally encode qutrits. Braiding the parafermion defects alone generates the full many-qutrit Clifford group. We further show that a simple single-probe interferometric measurement enables topologically protected magic-state preparation, promoting Clifford operations to a universal gate set. Importantly, the non-Abelian excitations in the $4e$ TSC are confined to externally controlled defects, making them uniquely identifiable and amenable to controlled creation and motion with superconducting-circuit technology. Our results establish hierarchical electron aggregation as a complementary principle for engineering topological quantum matter with enhanced computational power.

Source: arXiv:2602.06963v1 - http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.06963v1 PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.06963v1 Original Article: View on arXiv