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arXiv:0710.1301 · Physical Review A

Fault-tolerant quantum computation against biased noise

Panos Aliferis, John P. Preskill

Published Nov 19, 2008• 199 citations
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Abstract

We formulate a scheme for fault-tolerant quantum computation that works effectively against highly biased noise, where dephasing is far stronger than all other types of noise. In our scheme, the fundamental operations performed by the quantum computer are single-qubit preparations, single-qubit measurements, and conditional-phase (CPHASE) gates, where the noise in the CPHASE gates is biased. We show that the accuracy threshold for quantum computation can be improved by exploiting this noise asymmetry; e.g., if dephasing dominates all other types of noise in the CPHASE gates by four orders of magnitude, we find a rigorous lower bound on the accuracy threshold higher by a factor of 5 than for the case of unbiased noise.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.78.052331

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We formulate a scheme for fault-tolerant quantum computation that works effectively against highly biased noise, where dephasing is far stronger than all other types of noise. In our scheme, the fundamental operations performed by the quantum computer are single-qubit preparations, single-qubit measurements, and conditional-phase (CPHASE) gates, where the noise in the CPHASE gates is biased. We show that the accuracy threshold for quantum computation can be improved by exploiting this noise asymmetry; e.g., if dephasing dominates all other types of noise in the CPHASE gates by four orders of magnitude, we find a rigorous lower bound on the accuracy threshold higher by a factor of 5 than for the case of unbiased noise.
We present a universal scheme of pulsed operations suitable for the IBM oscillator-stabilized flux qubit comprising the controlled-σ z (cphase) gate, single-qubit preparations and measurements. Based on numerical simulations, we argue that the error rates for these operations can be as low as about 0.5% and that noise is highly biased, with phase errors being stronger than all other types of errors by a factor of nearly 10 3 . In contrast, the design of a controlled-σ x (cnot) gate for this system with an error rate of less than about 1.2% seems extremely challenging. We propose a special encoding that exploits the noise bias allowing us to implement a logical cnot gate where phase errors and all other types of errors have nearly balanced rates of about 0.4%. Our results illustrate how the design of an encoding scheme can be adjusted and optimized according to the available physical operations and the particular noise characteristics of experimental devices.
Qubits with strongly biased noise, in which phase-flip errors are orders of magnitude more frequent than bit-flips, arise both naturally, as in electron and nuclear spins, and by engineering, as in stabilized cat qubits. This noise structure holds the promise of reducing the daunting hardware overhead of fault-tolerant quantum computing, but exploiting it requires physical operations that do not convert frequent phase-flips into rare bit-flips. In this review, we analyze the most prominent fault-tolerant protocols for biased-noise qubits, organized according to the available set of such bias-preserving operations. When this set is restricted to the CZ gate together with preparation and measurement in the X basis, we show that the complexity of the required syndrome extraction gadgets essentially cancels the benefit of the noise bias: at experimentally relevant error rates, one may as well ignore the bias and rely on standard error correction designed for depolarizing noise. The situation changes drastically when a bias-preserving CX gate is available: the hierarchy of errors can then be reflected in the structure of the code, with frequent phase-flips corrected by a dedicated high-threshold code and rare bit-flips by concatenation with a high-rate code. The same hierarchy also enables hardware-efficient preparation of magic states. Finally, as a bias-preserving CX is forbidden in naturally biased platforms and challenging in engineered ones, we present a measurement-based architecture in which a high-fidelity quantum non-demolition readout of multi-qubit Pauli Z operators takes its place, extending these overhead reductions to a much broader range of physical platforms.
We develop a scheme for fault-tolerant quantum computation based on asymmetric Bacon-Shor codes, which works effectively against highly biased noise dominated by dephasing. We find the optimal Bacon-Shor block size as a function of the noise strength and the noise bias, and estimate the logical error rate and overhead cost achieved by this optimal code. Our fault-tolerant gadgets, based on gate teleportation, are well suited for hardware platforms with geometrically local gates in two dimensions.
We analyze a model for fault-tolerant quantum computation with low overhead suitable for situations where the noise is biased. The basis for this scheme is a gadget for the fault-tolerant preparation of magic states that enable universal fault-tolerant quantum computation using only Clifford gates that preserve the noise bias. We analyze the distillation of $|T\ensuremath{\rangle}$-type magic states using this gadget at the physical level, followed by concatenation with the 15-qubit quantum Reed-Muller code, and comparing our results with standard constructions. In the regime where the noise bias (rate of Pauli ZZZ errors relative to other single-qubit errors) is greater than a factor of 10, our scheme has lower overhead across a broad range of relevant noise rates.
Noise in quantum computing is countered with quantum error correction. Achieving optimal performance will require tailoring codes and decoding algorithms to account for features of realistic noise, such as the common situation where the noise is biased towards dephasing. Here we introduce an efficient high-threshold decoder for a noise-tailored surface code based on minimum-weight perfect matching. The decoder exploits the symmetries of its syndrome under the action of biased noise and generalizes to the fault-tolerant regime where measurements are unreliable. Using this decoder, we obtain fault-tolerant thresholds in excess of 6% for a phenomenological noise model in the limit where dephasing dominates. These gains persist even for modest noise biases: we find a threshold of ∼5% in an experimentally relevant regime where dephasing errors occur at a rate 100 times greater than bit-flip errors.
A quantum computer -- i.e., a computer capable of manipulating data in quantum superposition -- would find applications including factoring, quantum simulation and tests of basic quantum theory. Since quantum superpositions are fragile, the major hurdle in building such a computer is overcoming noise. Developed 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 procedures. But proof techniques could not show that these promising fault-tolerance schemes tolerated any noise at all. With an analysis based on decomposing complicated probability distributions into mixtures of simpler ones, we rigorously prove the existence of constant tolerable noise rates ("noise thresholds") for error-detection-based schemes. Numerical calculations indicate that the actual noise threshold this method yields is lower-bounded by 0.1% noise per gate.