71 research outputs found
Unification and limitations of error suppression techniques for adiabatic quantum computing
While adiabatic quantum computation (AQC) possesses some intrinsic robustness
to noise, it is expected that a form of error control will be necessary for
large scale computations. Error control ideas developed for circuit-model
quantum computation do not transfer easily to the AQC model and to date there
have been two main proposals to suppress errors during an AQC implementation:
energy gap protection and dynamical decoupling. Here we show that these two
methods are fundamentally related and may be analyzed within the same
formalism. We analyze the effectiveness of such error suppression techniques
and identify critical constraints on the performance of error suppression in
AQC, suggesting that error suppression by itself is insufficient for
fault-tolerant, large-scale AQC and that a form of error correction is needed.
This manuscript has been superseded by the articles, "Error suppression and
error correction in adiabatic quantum computation I: techniques and
challenges," arXiv:1307.5893, and "Error suppression and error correction in
adiabatic quantum computation II: non-equilibrium dynamics," arXiv:1307.5892.Comment: 9 pages. Update replaces "Equivalence" with "Unification." This
manuscript has been superseded by the two-article series: arXiv:1307.5892 and
arXiv:1307.589
Estimating the bias of a noisy coin
Optimal estimation of a coin's bias using noisy data is surprisingly
different from the same problem with noiseless data. We study this problem
using entropy risk to quantify estimators' accuracy. We generalize the "add
Beta" estimators that work well for noiseless coins, and we find that these
hedged maximum-likelihood (HML) estimators achieve a worst-case risk of
O(N^{-1/2}) on noisy coins, in contrast to O(1/N) in the noiseless case. We
demonstrate that this increased risk is unavoidable and intrinsic to noisy
coins, by constructing minimax estimators (numerically). However, minimax
estimators introduce extreme bias in return for slight improvements in the
worst-case risk. So we introduce a pointwise lower bound on the minimum
achievable risk as an alternative to the minimax criterion, and use this bound
to show that HML estimators are pretty good. We conclude with a survey of
scientific applications of the noisy coin model in social science, physical
science, and quantum information science.Comment: 10 page
Climbing Mount Scalable: Physical-Resource Requirements for a Scalable Quantum Computer
The primary resource for quantum computation is Hilbert-space dimension.
Whereas Hilbert space itself is an abstract construction, the number of
dimensions available to a system is a physical quantity that requires physical
resources. Avoiding a demand for an exponential amount of these resources
places a fundamental constraint on the systems that are suitable for scalable
quantum computation. To be scalable, the effective number of degrees of freedom
in the computer must grow nearly linearly with the number of qubits in an
equivalent qubit-based quantum computer.Comment: LATEX, 24 pages, 1 color .eps figure. This new version has been
accepted for publication in Foundations of Physic
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