Upper bounds on fault tolerance thresholds of noisy Clifford-based quantum computers

We consider the possibility of adding noise to a quantum circuit to make it efficiently simulatable classically. In previous works, this approach has been used to derive upper bounds to fault tolerance thresholds-usually by identifying a privileged resource, such as an entangling gate or a non-Clifford operation, and then deriving the noise levels required to make it 'unprivileged'. In this work, we consider extensions of this approach where noise is added to Clifford gates too and then 'commuted' around until it concentrates on attacking the non-Clifford resource. While commuting noise around is not always straightforward, we find that easy instances can be identified in popular fault tolerance proposals, thereby enabling sharper upper bounds to be derived in these cases. For instance we find that if we take Knill's (2005 Nature 434 39) fault tolerance proposal together with the ability to prepare any possible state in the XY plane of the Bloch sphere, then not more than 3.69% error-per-gate noise is sufficient to make it classical, and 13.71% of Knill's noise model is sufficient. These bounds have been derived without noise being added to the decoding parts of the circuits. Introducing such noise in a toy example suggests that the present approach can be optimized further to yield tighter bounds

Critical and noncritical long range entanglement in the Klein-Gordon field

We investigate the entanglement between two separated segments in the vacuum state of a free 1D Klein-Gordon field, where explicit computations are performed in the continuum limit of the linear harmonic chain. We show that the entanglement, which we measure by the logarithmic negativity, is finite with no further need for renormalization. We find that the quantum correlations decay much faster than the classical correlations as in the critical limit long range entanglement decays exponentially for separations larger than the size of the segments. As the segments become closer to each other the entanglement diverges as a power law. The noncritical regime manifests richer behavior, as the entanglement depends both on the size of the segments and on their separation. In correspondence with the von Neumann entropy long-range entanglement also distinguishes critical from noncritical systems

Quantum dynamics of bio-molecular systems in noisy environments

We discuss three different aspects of the quantum dynamics of bio-molecular systems and more generally complex networks in the presence of strongly coupled environments. Firstly, we make a case for the systematic study of fundamental structural elements underlying the quantum dynamics of these systems, identify such elements and explore the resulting interplay of quantum dynamics and environmental decoherence. Secondly, we critically examine some existing approaches to the numerical description of system-environment interaction in the non-perturbative regime and present a promising new method that can overcome some limitations of existing methods. Thirdly, we present an approach towards deciding and quantifying the non-classicality of the action of the environment and the observed system-dynamics. We stress the relevance of these tools for strengthening the interplay between theoretical and experimental research in this field.Comment: Proceedings of the 22nd Solvay Conference in Chemistry on "Quantum Effects in Chemistry and Biology

Environment-Mediated Quantum State Transfer

We propose a scheme for quantum state transfer(QST) between two qubits which is based on their individual interaction with a common boson environment. The corresponding single mode spin-boson Hamiltonian is solved by mapping it onto a wave propagation problem in a semi-infinite ladder and the fidelity is obtained. High fidelity occurs when the qubits are equally coupled to the boson while the fidelity becomes smaller for nonsymmetric couplings. The complete phase diagram for such an arbitrary QST mediated by bosons is discussed.Comment: 6 pages and 5 figure