A topological quantum computer should allow intrinsically fault-tolerant quantum computation, but there remains uncertainty about how such a computer can be implemented. It is known that topological quantum computation can be implemented with limited quasiparticle braiding capabilities, in fact using only a single mobile quasiparticle, if the system can be properly initialized by measurements. It is also known that measurements alone suffice without any braiding, provided that the measurement devices can be dynamically created and modified. We study a model in which both measurement and braiding capabilities are limited. Given the ability to pull nontrivial Fibonacci anyon pairs from the vacuum with a certain success probability, we show how to simulate universal quantum computation by braiding one quasiparticle and with only one measurement, to read out the result. The difficulty lies in initializing the system. We give a systematic construction of a family of braid sequences that initialize to arbitrary accuracy nontrivial composite anyons. Instead of using the Solovay-Kitaev theorem, the sequences are based on a quantum algorithm for convergent search.
A topological quantum computer should allow intrinsically fault-tolerant quantum computation, but there remains uncertainty about how such a computer can be implemented. It is known that topological quantum computation can be implemented with limited quasiparticle braiding capabilities, in fact using only a single mobile quasiparticle, if the system can be properly initialized by measurements. It is also known that measurements alone suffice without any braiding, provided that the measurement devices can be dynamically created and modified. We study a model in which both measurement and braiding capabilities are limited. Given the ability to pull nontrivial Fibonacci anyon pairs from the vacuum with a certain success probability, we show how to simulate universal quantum computation by braiding one quasiparticle and with only one measurement, to read out the result. The difficulty lies in initializing the system. We give a systematic construction of a family of braid sequences that initialize to arbitrary accuracy nontrivial composite anyons. Instead of using the Solovay-Kitaev theorem, the sequences are based on a quantum algorithm for convergent search.
A topological quantum computer should allow intrinsically fault-tolerant quantum computation, but there remains uncertainty about how such a computer can be implemented. It is known that topological quantum computation can be implemented with limited quasiparticle braiding capabilities, in fact using only a single mobile quasiparticle, if the system can be properly initialized by measurements. It is also known that measurements alone suffice without any braiding, provided that the measurement devices can be dynamically created and modified. We study a model in which both measurement and braiding capabilities are limited. Given the ability to pull nontrivial Fibonacci anyon pairs from the vacuum with a certain success probability, we show how to simulate universal quantum computation by braiding one quasiparticle and with only one measurement, to read out the result. The difficulty lies in initializing the system. We give a systematic construction of a family of braid sequences that initialize to arbitrary accuracy nontrivial composite anyons. Instead of using the Solovay-Kitaev theorem, the sequences are based on a quantum algorithm for convergent search.
A topological quantum computer should allow intrinsically fault-tolerant quantum compu-tation, but there remains uncertainty about how such a computer can be implemented. It is known that topological quantum computation can be implemented with limited quasiparticle braiding capabilities, in fact using only a single mobile quasiparticle, if the system can be properly initialized by measurements. It is also known that measurements alone suffice without any braiding, provided that the measurement devices can be dynamically created and modified. We study a model in which both measurement and braiding capabilities are limited. Given the ability to pull nontrivial Fibonacci anyon pairs from the vacuum with a certain success probability, we show how to simulate universal quantum computation by braiding one quasiparticle and with only one measurement, to read out the result. The difficulty lies in initializing the system. We give a systematic construction of a family of braid sequences that initialize to arbitrary accuracy nontrivial composite anyons. Instead of using the Solovay-Kitaev theorem, the sequences are based on a quantum algorithm for convergent search. 1
A quantum computer must be capable of manipulating quantum information while at the same time protecting it from error and loss of quantum coherence due to interactions with the environment. Topological quantum computation (TQC) offers a particularly elegant way to achieve this. In TQC, quantum information is stored in exotic states of matter which are intrinsically protected from decoherence, and quantum computation is carried out by dragging particle-like excitations (quasiparticles) around one another in two space dimensions. The resulting quasiparticle trajectories define world-lines in three-dimensional space-time, and the corresponding computation depends only on the topology of the braids formed by the world-lines. Quasiparticles that can be used for TQC are expected to exist in a variety of fractional quantum Hall states, among them the so-called Fibonacci anyons. These quasiparticles are conjectured to exist in the = 12/5 fractional quantum Hall state which has been observed in experiments. It has been shown that qubits can be encoded using three or four Fibonacci anyons and single-qubit gates can be carried out by braiding quasiparticles within each qubit. Braids that approximate single-qubit gates can be found through brute force searching and the result can be systematically improved, to any desired accuracy, by applying the Solovay- Kitaev algorithm in SU(2). Two-qubit gates are significantly harder to implement, mostly due to the following two reasons. First, the Hilbert space of the quasiparticles forming two qubits is considerably larger than the Hilbert space of the quasiparticles of a single qubit. Therefore, performing a brute force search to find braids that approximate two-qubit gates, as well as the implementation of the Solovay-Kitaev algorithm for subsequent improvements are prohibitively more difficult. Second, to construct any entangling two-qubit gate, one needs to braid some xvii of the quasiparticles from one qubit around quasiparticles of the other qubit. This process will inevitably lead to leakage errors, i.e. transitions from the qubit space to other available states in the Hilbert space. In this thesis, I will present several efficient methods to construct two-qubit gates using a specific class of quasiparticles. In particular, I show that the problem of finding braids that correspond to two-qubit gates can be reduced to a series of smaller problems which involve braiding only three objects at a time. The required computational power for finding these braids is equivalent to that needed to find single-qubit gates, therefore, these braids can be found with the same high degree of accuracy and efficiency. The end result of this work is an efficient procedure for translating (or "compiling") arbitrary quantum algorithms into specific braiding patterns for Fibonacci anyons, as well as quasiparticles of certain other fractional quantum Hall states that can be used for TQC.
Topological quantum computation (TQC) is one of the most striking architectures that can realize fault-tolerant quantum computers. In TQC, the logical space and the quantum gates are topologically protected, i.e., robust against local disturbances. The topological protection, however, requires rather complicated lattice models and hard-to-manipulate dynamics; even the simplest system that can realize universal TQC--the Fibonacci anyon system--lacks a physical realization, let alone braiding the non-Abelian anyons. Here, we propose a disk model that can realize the Fibonacci anyon system, and construct the topologically protected logical spaces with the Fibonacci anyons. Via braiding the Fibonacci anyons, we can implement universal quantum gates on the logical space. Our proposal is platform-independent. As a demonstration, we implement a topological Hadamard gate on a logical qubit through a sequence of 15 braiding operations of three Fibonacci anyons with merely 2 nuclear spin qubits. The gate fidelity reaches 97.18% by randomized benchmarking. We further prove by experiment that the logical space and Hadamard gate are topologically protected: local disturbances due to thermal fluctuations result in a global phase only. Our work is a proof of principle of TQC and paves the way towards fault-tolerant quantum computation.
Topological quantum computation (TQC) is one of the most striking architectures that can realize fault-tolerant quantum computers. In TQC, the logical space and the quantum gates are topologically protected, i.e., robust against local disturbances. The topological protection, however, requires complicated lattice models and hard-to-manipulate dynamics; even the simplest system that can realize universal TQC—the Fibonacci anyon system—lacks a physical realization, let alone braiding the non-Abelian anyons. Here, we propose a disk model that can simulate the Fibonacci anyon system and construct the topologically protected logical spaces with the Fibonacci anyons. Via braiding the Fibonacci anyons, we can implement universal quantum gates on the logical space. Our disk model merely requires two physical qubits to realize three Fibonacci anyons at the boundary. By 15 sequential braiding operations, we construct a topologically protected Hadamard gate, which is to date the least-resource requirement for TQC. To showcase, we implement a topological Hadamard gate with two nuclear spin qubits, which reaches 97.18 % fidelity by randomized benchmarking. We further prove by experiment that the logical space and Hadamard gate are topologically protected: local disturbances due to thermal fluctuations result in a global phase only. As a platform-independent proposal, our work is a proof of principle of TQC and paves the way toward fault-tolerant quantum computation.
In seminal work (arxiv:quant-ph/9707021) Alexei Kitaev proposed topological quantum computing (arXiv:cond-mat/0010440, arxiv:quant-ph/9707021, arXiv:quant-ph/0001108, arXiv:0707.1889), whereby logic gates of a quantum computer are conducted by creating, braiding and fusing anyonic particles on a two-dimensional plane. Furthermore, he showed the proposal is inherently robust to local perturbations (arXiv:cond-mat/0010440, arxiv:quant-ph/9707021, arXiv:1001.0344, arXiv:1001.4363) when anyons are created as quasiparticle excitations of a topologically ordered lattice model prepared at zero temperature. Over the decades following this proposal there have been considerable technological developments towards the construction of a fault-tolerant quantum computer. Rather than maintaining some target ground state at zero temperature, a modern approach is to actively correct the errors a target state experiences, where we use noisy quantum circuit elements to identify and subsequently correct for deviations from the ideal state. We present an error-correction scheme that enables us to carry out robust universal quantum computation by braiding anyons. We show that our scheme can be carried out on a suitably large device with an arbitrarily small failure rate assuming circuit elements are below some threshold level of local noise. The error-corrected scheme we have developed therefore enables us to carry out fault-tolerant topological quantum computation using modern quantum hardware that is now under development.