18 research outputs found
Experimental magic state distillation for fault-tolerant quantum computing
Any physical quantum device for quantum information processing is subject to
errors in implementation. In order to be reliable and efficient, quantum
computers will need error correcting or error avoiding methods. Fault-tolerance
achieved through quantum error correction will be an integral part of quantum
computers. Of the many methods that have been discovered to implement it, a
highly successful approach has been to use transversal gates and specific
initial states. A critical element for its implementation is the availability
of high-fidelity initial states such as |0> and the Magic State. Here we report
an experiment, performed in a nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) quantum
processor, showing sufficient quantum control to improve the fidelity of
imperfect initial magic states by distilling five of them into one with higher
fidelity
Anyons in a weakly interacting system
We describe a theoretical proposal for a system whose excitations are anyons
with the exchange phase pi/4 and charge -e/2, but, remarkably, can be built by
filling a set of single-particle states of essentially noninteracting
electrons. The system consists of an artificially structured type-II
superconducting film adjacent to a 2D electron gas in the integer quantum Hall
regime with unit filling fraction. The proposal rests on the observation that a
vacancy in an otherwise periodic vortex lattice in the superconductor creates a
bound state in the 2DEG with total charge -e/2. A composite of this
fractionally charged hole and the missing flux due to the vacancy behaves as an
anyon. The proposed setup allows for manipulation of these anyons and could
prove useful in various schemes for fault-tolerant topological quantum
computation.Comment: 7 pages with 3 figures. For related work and info visit
http://www.physics.ubc.ca/~fran
Efficient fault-tolerant quantum computing
Fault tolerant quantum computing methods which work with efficient quantum
error correcting codes are discussed. Several new techniques are introduced to
restrict accumulation of errors before or during the recovery. Classes of
eligible quantum codes are obtained, and good candidates exhibited. This
permits a new analysis of the permissible error rates and minimum overheads for
robust quantum computing. It is found that, under the standard noise model of
ubiquitous stochastic, uncorrelated errors, a quantum computer need be only an
order of magnitude larger than the logical machine contained within it in order
to be reliable. For example, a scale-up by a factor of 22, with gate error rate
of order , is sufficient to permit large quantum algorithms such as
factorization of thousand-digit numbers.Comment: 21 pages plus 5 figures. Replaced with figures in new format to avoid
problem
Observation of Dirac plasmons in a topological insulator
Plasmons are the quantized collective oscillations of electrons in metals and
doped semiconductors. The plasmons of ordinary, massive electrons are since a
long time basic ingredients of research in plasmonics and in optical
metamaterials. Plasmons of massless Dirac electrons were instead recently
observed in a purely two-dimensional electron system (2DEG)like graphene, and
their properties are promising for new tunable plasmonic metamaterials in the
terahertz and the mid-infrared frequency range. Dirac quasi-particles are known
to exist also in the two-dimensional electron gas which forms at the surface of
topological insulators due to a strong spin-orbit interaction. Therefore,one
may look for their collective excitations by using infrared spectroscopy. Here
we first report evidence of plasmonic excitations in a topological insulator
(Bi2Se3), that was engineered in thin micro-ribbon arrays of different width W
and period 2W to select suitable values of the plasmon wavevector k. Their
lineshape was found to be extremely robust vs. temperature between 6 and 300 K,
as one may expect for the excitations of topological carriers. Moreover, by
changing W and measuring in the terahertz range the plasmonic frequency vP vs.
k we could show, without using any fitting parameter, that the dispersion curve
is in quantitative agreement with that predicted for Dirac plasmons.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, published in Nature Nanotechnology (2013
Topological Quantum Glassiness
Quantum tunneling often allows pathways to relaxation past energy barriers
which are otherwise hard to overcome classically at low temperatures. However,
this is not always the case. In this paper we provide simple exactly solvable
examples where the barriers each system encounters on its approach to lower and
lower energy states become increasingly large and eventually scale with the
system size. If the environment couples locally to the physical degrees of
freedom in the system, tunnelling under large barriers requires processes whose
order in perturbation theory is proportional to the width of the barrier. This
results in quantum relaxation rates that are exponentially suppressed in system
size: For these quantum systems, no physical bath can provide a mechanism for
relaxation that is not dynamically arrested at low temperatures. The examples
discussed here are drawn from three dimensional generalizations of Kitaev's
toric code, originally devised in the context of topological quantum computing.
They are devoid of any local order parameters or symmetry breaking and are thus
examples of topological quantum glasses. We construct systems that have slow
dynamics similar to either strong or fragile glasses. The example with
fragile-like relaxation is interesting in that the topological defects are
neither open strings or regular open membranes, but fractal objects with
dimension .Comment: (18 pages, 4 figures, v2: typos and updated figure); Philosophical
Magazine (2011
Superconducting Nanocircuits for Topologically Protected Qubits
For successful realization of a quantum computer, its building blocks
(qubits) should be simultaneously scalable and sufficiently protected from
environmental noise. Recently, a novel approach to the protection of
superconducting qubits has been proposed. The idea is to prevent errors at the
"hardware" level, by building a fault-free (topologically protected) logical
qubit from "faulty" physical qubits with properly engineered interactions
between them. It has been predicted that the decoupling of a protected logical
qubit from local noises would grow exponentially with the number of physical
qubits. Here we report on the proof-of-concept experiments with a prototype
device which consists of twelve physical qubits made of nanoscale Josephson
junctions. We observed that due to properly tuned quantum fluctuations, this
qubit is protected against magnetic flux variations well beyond linear order,
in agreement with theoretical predictions. These results demonstrate the
feasibility of topologically protected superconducting qubits.Comment: 25 pages, 5 figure