Protected Rabi oscillation induced by natural interactions among physical qubits

For a system composed of nine qubits, we show that natural interactions among the qubits induce the time evolution that can be regarded, at discrete times, as the Rabi oscillation of a logical qubit. Neither fine tuning of the parameters nor switching of the interactions is necessary. Although straightforward application of quantum error correction fails, we propose a protocol by which the logical Rabi oscillation is protected against all single-qubit errors. The present method thus opens a simple and realistic way of protecting the unitary time evolution against noise.Comment: In this revised manuscript, new sections V, VI, VII and new appendices A, B, C have been added to give detailed discussions. 13 pages, 4 figure

The Role of Correlated Noise in Quantum Computing

This paper aims to give an overview of the current state of fault-tolerant quantum computing, by surveying a number of results in the field. We show that thresholds can be obtained for a simple noise model as first proved in [AB97, Kit97, KLZ98], by presenting a proof for statistically independent noise, following the presentation of Aliferis, Gottesman and Preskill [AGP06]. We also present a result by Terhal and Burkard [TB05] and later improved upon by Aliferis, Gottesman and Preskill [AGP06] that shows a threshold can still be obtained for local non-Markovian noise, where we allow the noise to be weakly correlated in space and time. We then turn to negative results, presenting work by Ben-Aroya and Ta-Shma [BT11] who showed conditional errors cannot be perfectly corrected. We end our survey by briefly mentioning some more speculative objections, as put forth by Kalai [Kal08, Kal09, Kal11]