While solid-state devices offer naturally reliable hardware for modern
classical computers, thus far quantum information processors resemble vacuum
tube computers in being neither reliable nor scalable. Strongly correlated many
body states stabilized in topologically ordered matter offer the possibility of
naturally fault tolerant computing, but are both challenging to engineer and
coherently control and cannot be easily adapted to different physical
platforms. We propose an architecture which achieves some of the robustness
properties of topological models but with a drastically simpler construction.
Quantum information is stored in the symmetry-protected degenerate ground
states of spin-1 chains, while quantum gates are performed by adiabatic
non-Abelian holonomies using only single-site fields and nearest-neighbor
couplings. Gate operations respect the symmetry, and so inherit some protection
from noise and disorder from the symmetry-protected ground states.Comment: 19 pages, 4 figures. v2: published versio