Faulty Tolerant Quantum Error Correction

Ben W. Reichardt,
California Institute of TechnologyAbstract: The fragile nature of quantum superpositions makes it particularly important to design robust schemes for fault-tolerant quantum computation. Over the last couple of years, new schemes for achieving fault tolerance based on error detection, rather than error correction, appear to tolerate as much as 3-6% noise per gate -- an order of magnitude better than previous schemes. But proof techniques could not show that these promising fault-tolerance schemes tolerated any noise at all.With an analysis based on decomposing probability distributions, we prove the existence of constant tolerable noise rates ("noise thresholds") for error-detection-based schemes. The talk will survey these recent developments
and present the probabilistic mixing technique. (The talk will not assume any background in quantum computation.)Bio: Ben Reichardt is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Quantum Information, at Caltech. He has a B.S. degree in mathematics from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley. http://www.its.caltech.edu/~breic/

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Alma Hernandez