2,259 research outputs found
Fault-tolerant quantum computation
Recently, it was realized that use of the properties of quantum mechanics
might speed up certain computations dramatically. Interest in quantum
computation has since been growing. One of the main difficulties of realizing
quantum computation is that decoherence tends to destroy the information in a
superposition of states in a quantum computer, thus making long computations
impossible. A futher difficulty is that inaccuracies in quantum state
transformations throughout the computation accumulate, rendering the output of
long computations unreliable. It was previously known that a quantum circuit
with t gates could tolerate O(1/t) amounts of inaccuracy and decoherence per
gate. We show, for any quantum computation with t gates, how to build a
polynomial size quantum circuit that can tolerate O(1/(log t)^c) amounts of
inaccuracy and decoherence per gate, for some constant c. We do this by showing
how to compute using quantum error correcting codes. These codes were
previously known to provide resistance to errors while storing and transmitting
quantum data.Comment: Latex, 11 pages, no figures, in 37th Symposium on Foundations of
Computing, IEEE Computer Society Press, 1996, pp. 56-6
Equivalence of Additivity Questions in Quantum Information Theory
We reduce the number of open additivity problems in quantum information
theory by showing that four of them are equivalent. We show that the
conjectures of additivity of the minimum output entropy of a quantum channel,
additivity of the Holevo expression for the classical capacity of a quantum
channel, additivity of the entanglement of formation, and strong
superadditivity of the entanglement of formation, are either all true or all
false.Comment: now 20 pages, replaced to add a reference, remove a reference to a
claimed result about locally minimal output entropy states (my proof of this
was incorrect), correct minor typos, and add more explanation for the
background of these conjecture
Quantum Computers, Factoring, and Decoherence
In a quantum computer any superposition of inputs evolves unitarily into the
corresponding superposition of outputs. It has been recently demonstrated that
such computers can dramatically speed up the task of finding factors of large
numbers -- a problem of great practical significance because of its
cryptographic applications. Instead of the nearly exponential (, for a number with digits) time required by the fastest classical
algorithm, the quantum algorithm gives factors in a time polynomial in
(). This enormous speed-up is possible in principle because quantum
computation can simultaneously follow all of the paths corresponding to the
distinct classical inputs, obtaining the solution as a result of coherent
quantum interference between the alternatives. Hence, a quantum computer is
sophisticated interference device, and it is essential for its quantum state to
remain coherent in the course of the operation. In this report we investigate
the effect of decoherence on the quantum factorization algorithm and establish
an upper bound on a ``quantum factorizable'' based on the decoherence
suffered per operational step.Comment: 7 pages,LaTex + 2 postcript figures in a uuencoded fil
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