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arXiv:0811.0033 · Open Systems & Information Dynamics

On Thermal Stability of Topological Qubit in Kitaev's 4D Model

Robert Alicki, Michał Horodecki, Paweł Horodecki, Ryszard Horodecki

Published Mar 1, 2010• 148 citations
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Abstract

We analyse stability of the four-dimensional Kitaev model — a candidate for scalable quantum memory — in finite temperature within the weak coupling Markovian limit. It is shown that, below a critical temperature, certain topological qubit observables X and Z possess relaxation times exponentially long in the size of the system. Their construction involves polynomial in system size algorithm which uses as an input the results of measurements performed on all individual spins. We also discuss the drawbacks of such candidate for quantum memory and mention the implications of the stability of qubit for statistical mechanics.

DOI
10.1142/s1230161210000023

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We analyse stability of the four-dimensional Kitaev model — a candidate for scalable quantum memory — in finite temperature within the weak coupling Markovian limit. It is shown that, below a critical temperature, certain topological qubit observables X and Z possess relaxation times exponentially long in the size of the system. Their construction involves polynomial in system size algorithm which uses as an input the results of measurements performed on all individual spins. We also discuss the drawbacks of such candidate for quantum memory and mention the implications of the stability of qubit for statistical mechanics.
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We discuss the existence of stable topological quantum memory at finite temperature. At stake here is the fundamental question of whether it is, in principle, possible to store quantum information for macroscopic times without the intervention from the external world, that is, without error correction. We study the toric code in two dimensions with an additional bosonic field that couples to the defects, in the presence of a generic environment at finite temperature: the toric-boson model. Although the coupling constants for the bare model are not finite in the thermodynamic limit, the model has a finite spectrum. We show that in the topological phase, there is a finite temperature below which open strings are confined and therefore the lifetime of the memory can be made arbitrarily (polynomially) long in system size. The interaction with the bosonic field yields a long-range attractive force between the end points of open strings but leaves closed strings and topological order intact.
Thermal stability of the topological color code in the presence of a thermal bath is studied. We study the Lindblad evolution of the observables in the weak-coupling limit of the Born-Markov approximation. The autocorrelation functions of the observables are used as a figure of merit for the thermal stability. We show that all of the observables autocorrelation functions decay exponentially in time. By finding a lower bound of the decay rate, which is a constant independent of the system size, we show that the topological color code is unstable against thermal fluctuations from the bath at finite temperature, even though it is stable at T=0T=0T=0 against local quantum perturbations.