Abstract A novel concept of quantum random access memory (qRAM) employing a quantum walk is provided. Our qRAM relies on a bucket brigade scheme to access the memory cells. Introducing a bucket with chirality left and right as a quantum walker, and considering its quantum motion on a full binary tree, we can efficiently deliver the bucket to the designated memory cells, and fill the bucket with the desired information in the form of quantum superposition states. Our procedure has several advantages. First, we do not need to place any quantum devices at the nodes of the binary tree, and hence in our qRAM architecture, the cost to maintain the coherence can be significantly reduced. Second, our scheme is fully parallelized. Consequently, only O(n) steps are required to access and retrieve O(2 n ) data in the form of quantum superposition states. Finally, the simplicity of our procedure may allow the design of qRAM with simpler structures.
We study the robustness of the bucket brigade quantum random access memory model introduced by Giovannetti et al (2008 Phys. Rev. Lett. 100 160501 ). Due to a result of Regev and Schiff (ICALP '08 733), we show that for a class of error models the error rate per gate in the bucket brigade quantum memory has to be of order (where is the size of the memory) whenever the memory is used as an oracle for the quantum searching problem. We conjecture that this is the case for any realistic error model that will be encountered in practice, and that for algorithms with super-polynomially many oracle queries the error rate must be super-polynomially small, which further motivates the need for quantum error correction. By contrast, for algorithms such as matrix inversion Harrow et al (2009 Phys. Rev. Lett. 103 150502 ) or quantum machine learning Rebentrost et al (2014 Phys. Rev. Lett. 113 130503 ) that only require a polynomial number of queries, the error rate only needs to be polynomially small and quantum error correction may not be required. We introduce a circuit model for the quantum bucket brigade architecture and argue that quantum error correction for the circuit causes the quantum bucket brigade architecture to lose its primary advantage of a small number of 'active' gates, since all components have to be actively error corrected.
A random access memory, or RAM, is a device that, when interrogated, returns the content of a memory location in a memory array. A quantum RAM, or qRAM, allows one to access superpositions of memory sites, which may contain either quantum or classical information. RAMs and qRAMs with
n-bit addresses can access
2n memory sites. Any design for a RAM or qRAM then requires
O(2n) two-bit logic gates. At first sight this requirement might seem to make large scale quantum versions of such devices impractical, due to the difficulty of constructing and operating coherent devices with large numbers of quantum logic gates. Here we analyze two different RAM architectures (the conventional fanout and the ``bucket brigade'') and propose some proof-of-principle implementations, which show that, in principle, only
O(n) two-qubit physical interactions need take place during each qRAM call. That is, although a qRAM needs
O(2n) quantum logic gates, only
O(n) need to be activated during a memory call. The resulting decrease in resources could give rise to the construction of large qRAMs that could operate without the need for extensive quantum error correction.
We study the robustness of the bucket brigade quantum random access memory model introduced by Giovannetti, Lloyd, and Maccone [Phys. Rev. Lett., 2008]. Due to a result of Regev and Schiff [ICALP, 2008], we show that for a class of error models the error rate per gate in the bucket brigade quantum memory has to be of order o(2^{-n/2}) (where N=2^n is the size of the memory) whenever the memory is used as an oracle for the quantum searching problem. We conjecture that this is the case for any realistic error model that will be encountered in practice, and that for algorithms with super-polynomially many oracle queries the error rate must be super-polynomially small, which further motivates the need for quantum error correction. We introduce a circuit model for the quantum bucket brigade architecture and argue that quantum error correction for the circuit causes the quantum bucket brigade architecture to lose its primary advantage of a small number of "active" gates, since all components have to be actively error corrected.
A random access memory (RAM) uses n bits to randomly address N=2(n) distinct memory cells. A quantum random access memory (QRAM) uses n qubits to address any quantum superposition of N memory cells. We present an architecture that exponentially reduces the requirements for a memory call: O(logN) switches need be thrown instead of the N used in conventional (classical or quantum) RAM designs. This yields a more robust QRAM algorithm, as it in general requires entanglement among exponentially less gates, and leads to an exponential decrease in the power needed for addressing. A quantum optical implementation is presented.
Quantum random access memory (QRAM)—memory which stores classical data but allows queries to be performed in superposition—is required for the implementation of numerous quantum algorithms. While naive implementations of QRAM are highly susceptible to decoherence and hence not scalable, it has been argued that the bucket-brigade QRAM architecture [Giovannetti et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 160501 (2008)] is highly resilient to noise, with the infidelity of a query scaling only logarithmically with the memory size. In prior analyses, however, this favorable scaling followed directly from the use of contrived noise models, thus leaving open the question of whether experimental implementations would actually enjoy the purported scaling advantage. In this work, we study the effects of decoherence on QRAM in full generality. Our main result is a proof that this favorable infidelity scaling holds for arbitrary error channels (including, e.g., depolarizing noise and coherent errors). Our proof identifies the origin of this noise resilience as the limited entanglement among the memory’s components, and it also reveals that significant architectural simplifications can be made while preserving the noise resilience. We verify these results numerically using a novel classical algorithm for the efficient simulation of noisy QRAM circuits. Our findings indicate that QRAM can be implemented with existing hardware in realistically noisy devices, and that high-fidelity queries are possible without quantum error correction. Furthermore, we also prove that the benefits of the bucket-brigade architecture persist when quantum error correction is used, in which case the scheme offers improved hardware efficiency and resilience to logical errors.