Motivated by the prospect of attaining Majorana modes at the ends of nanowires, we analyze interacting Majorana systems on general networks and lattices in an arbitrary number of dimensions, and derive universal spin duals. We prove that these interacting Majorana systems, quantum Ising gauge theories, and transverse-field Ising models with annealed bimodal disorder are all dual to one another on general planar graphs. This leads to an interesting connection between heavily disordered annealed Ising systems and uniform Ising theories with nearest-neighbor interactions. As any Dirac fermion (including electronic) operator can be expressed as a linear combination of two Majorana fermion operators, our results further lead to dualities between interacting Dirac fermionic systems on rather general lattices and graphs and corresponding spin systems. Such general complex Majorana architectures (other than those of simple square or other crystalline arrangements) might be of empirical relevance. As these systems display low-dimensional symmetries, they are candidates for realizing topological quantum order. The spin duals allow us to predict the feasibility of various standard transitions as well as spin-glass-type behavior in interacting Majorana fermion or electronic systems. Several systems that can be simulated by arrays of Majorana wires are further introduced and investigated: (1) the XXZ honeycomb compass model (intermediate between the classical Ising model on the honeycomb lattice and Kitaev's honeycomb model), (2) a checkerboard lattice realization of the model of Xu and Moore for superconducting $(p+ip)$ arrays, and a (3) compass-type two-flavor Hubbard model with both pairing and hopping terms. By the use of our dualities (tantamount to high-dimensional fermionization), we show that all of these systems lie in the three-dimensional Ising universality class. We further discuss how the existence of topological orders and bounds on autocorrelation times can be inferred by the use of symmetries and also propose to engineer quantum simulators via such Majorana wire networks.

• Received 4 April 2012

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.86.085415