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Decoherence in Open Majorana Systems Campbell, Earl T. Majorana Topological Gaussian Thermalization Decoherence Coupling to a thermal bath leads to decoherence of stored quantum information. For a system of Gaussian fermions, the fermionic analog of linear or Gaussian optics, these dynamics can be elegantly and efficiently described by evolution of the system's covariance matrix. Taking both system and bath to be Gaussian fermionic, we observe that decoherence occurs at a rate that is independent of the bath temperature. Furthermore, we also consider a weak coupling regime where the dynamics are Markovian. We present a microscopic derivation of Markovian master equations entirely in the language of covariance matrices, where temperature independence remains manifest. This is radically different from behaviour seen in other scenarios, such as when fermions interact with a bosonic bath. Our analysis applies to many Majorana fermion systems that have been heralded as very robust, topologically protected, qubits. In these systems, it has been claimed that thermal decoherence can be exponentially suppressed by reducing temperature, but we find Gaussian decoherence cannot be cooled away. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Earl T. Campbell 2015 Is Part Of LIPIcs, Volume 44, 10th Conference on the Theory of Quantum Computation, Communication and Cryptography (TQC 2015) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.TQC.2015.111 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-55528 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.TQC.2015.111 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode