Roads towards fault-tolerant universal quantum computation

Earl T. Campbell (1) , Barbara M. Terhal (2, 3) , Christophe Vuillot (2, 3)

1 Department of Physics and Astronomy [Sheffield]
2 JARA-IQI - JARA-Institute for Quantum Information
3 RWTH - Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen University

A practical quantum computer must not merely store information, but also process it. To prevent errors introduced by noise from multiplying and spreading, a fault-tolerant computational architecture is required. Current experiments are taking the first steps toward noise-resilient logical qubits. But to convert these quantum devices from memories to processors, it is necessary to specify how a universal set of gates is performed on them. The leading proposals for doing so, such as magic-state distillation and colour-code techniques, have high resource demands. Alternative schemes, such as those that use high-dimensional quantum codes in a modular architecture, have potential benefits, but need to be explored further.

Domaines: Physique Quantique [quant-ph]

Earl T. Campbell, Barbara M. Terhal, Christophe Vuillot. Roads towards fault-tolerant universal quantum computation. Nature, 2017, 549 (7671), pp.172--179. ⟨10.1038/nature23460⟩. ⟨hal-02351422⟩