Utilizing Topological Codes for Fault-Tolerant Universal Quantum Computing

SPEAKER: Jim Harrington
Los Alamos National LaboratoryABSTRACT: Kitaev's surface codes have the attractive property of requiring only local stabilizer measurements, while all logical error operators stretch between boundaries (or form non-trivial loops, in the case of a torus). This gives rise to an exponential suppression in logical errors as a function of code size, under an independent error model. I will present a history of the ideas connecting these surface codes to cluster states, which led to Raussendorf's suggested architecture of a single two-dimensional array of qubits for fault-tolerant universal quantum computation, with an estimated error threshold above 0.7%. I also plan to present very preliminary analysis on the quantum memory threshold for one of the topological color codes introduced by Bombin and Martin-Delgado.BIOGRAPHY: Jim Harrington studied quantum error correction in John Preskill's group at Caltech and received his Ph.D. in 2004. Jim came to Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) as an Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Fellow to work primarily on security proofs and protocols for quantum key distribution. He is now a Technical Staff Member at LANL and continues to work on a variety of topics in quantum information security and quantum coding theory.HOST: Prof. Todd Brun, tbrun@usc.edu

Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos