Decoherence of Majorana zero modes mediated by gapless fermions

We study the decoherence of a collection of Majorana zero modes weakly coupled to a gapless reservoir of noninteracting fermions. Using the Born-Markov approximation, we derive a Lindblad master equation for the dissipative dynamics of the Majorana zero modes. Due to the long-range coupling between Majorana zero modes mediated by the gapless reservoir, the Lindblad jump operators are nonlocal linear combinations of the Majorana operators. We show that, as a consequence, the dissipative dynamics can exhibit long relaxation times, i.e., a slow decay of fermion parities. A spectral analysis of the Liouvillian shows that the slowdown is suppressed as a power law of the distance between Majorana zero modes. Finally, we validate the Lindblad equation by comparison with unbiased numerical simulations of the time evolution of the full density matrix. In particular, these illustrate that non-Markovian dynamics establishes nonlocal correlations at small times.