Facets of Computation Platforms: From Conceptual Frameworks to Practical Instantiations

We live in an age in which computation touches upon every aspect of our lives in ever increasing ways. To meet the demand for increased computing power and ability, new computation strategies are continually being proposed. In this dissertation, we consider two research projects related to two such cutting edge paradigms. We first consider developing superconducting devices that implement asynchronous reversible ballistic computation. This paradigm was developed to circumvent Landauer’s principle of a minimum energy required per bitwise computation operation. We report the design of a new device, the rotary, which is a critical step towards developing universal computation gates in the scheme of synchronous reversible ballistic computation. Next, we turn to the consideration of anyons which have been predicted to enable topological quantum computing, a quantum computing paradigm that is relatively immune to environmental noise. We consider initial steps in the development of a Bethe ansatz solvable model that will help decipher the many-body properties of Majorana zero modes in superconducting Kitaev wires.