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arXiv:1405.4446

A protected vortex exciton qubit

Suvabrata De, Timothy P. Spiller

Published May 17, 2014• 0 citations
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Abstract

We propose a protected qubit which is `dual' to a suggestion of a superconducting current mirror qubit [A. Kitaev, arXiv:0609441 (2006)]. Our construction can be regarded as the magnetic analogue of Kitaev's proposal: it inherits the intrinsic fault-tolerance of the current mirror qubit, but may perform better than it in the laboratory, since magnetic noise is generally less of a problem than electric noise. We adapt the scheme for universal fault-tolerant quantum computation proposed by Kitaev to our construction.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.1405.4446

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We propose a protected qubit which is `dual' to a suggestion of a superconducting current mirror qubit [A. Kitaev, arXiv:0609441 (2006)]. Our construction can be regarded as the magnetic analogue of Kitaev's proposal: it inherits the intrinsic fault-tolerance of the current mirror qubit, but may perform better than it in the laboratory, since magnetic noise is generally less of a problem than electric noise. We adapt the scheme for universal fault-tolerant quantum computation proposed by Kitaev to our construction.
We propose a qubit implementation based on exciton condensation in capacitively coupled Josephson junction chains. The qubit is protected in the sense that all unwanted terms in its effective Hamiltonian are exponentially suppressed as the chain length increases. We also describe an implementation of a universal set of quantum gates. Most gates also offer exponential error suppression. The only gate that is not intrinsically fault-tolerant needs to be realized with about 50% precision, provided the other gates are exact.
In part I, we describe a protected qubit which is realized in a two-dimensional array of Josephson junctions. Our construction is the magnetic analogue of (‘dual’ to) a suggestion of a superconducting current mirror qubit (Kitaev,2006b). Our proposal therefore inherits the intrinsic fault-tolerance of the current mirror qubit, but may perform better than it in the laboratory, since magnetic \nnoise is generally less of a problem than electric noise. We adapt the scheme for universal fault-tolerant quantum computation proposed by Kitaev to our construction. \n \nIn part II, we describe a method of detecting the Chern number and entanglement properties of topological four-component free-fermion systems in cold atom experiments. We show that the Chern number of these systems decomposes into a sum of subsystem winding numbers which can be measured from time-of-flight images. Such images also enable the degree of subsystem entanglement in, and the component entanglement spectra of, these systems to be measured. The method is applied to the quantum spin-Hall insulator and \na staggered topological superconductor. We find that the phase diagrams are accurately reproduced, except when the subsystems are highly entangled.
Protected superconducting qubits such as the 000-πππ qubit promise to substantially suppress error rates, facilitating fault-tolerant quantum computing with fewer qubits. Measuring these qubits is challenging due to their protected nature, and thus far no concrete proposal exists for how to measure them without breaking their protection. Here we show how to perform protected measurements of the 000-πππ qubit in two orthogonal bases. The protection of these measurements is facilitated by their quantum non-demolition nature, allowing faults on ancillary measurement qubits to be tolerated. As experimental progress pushes protected qubits further into the low error-rate regime, our techniques will be crucial for fault-tolerant universal control.
We review the general notion of topological protection of quantum states in spin models and its relation with the ideas of quantum error correction. We show that topological protection can be viewed as a Hamiltonian realization of error correction: for a quantum code for which the minimal number of errors that remain undetected is N, the corresponding Hamiltonian model of the effects of the environment noise appears only in the Nth order of the perturbation theory.We discuss the simplest model Hamiltonians that realize topological protection and their implementation in superconducting arrays. We focus on two dual realizations: in one the protected state is stored in the parity of the Cooper pair number, in the other, in the parity of the flux number. In both cases the superconducting arrays allow a number of fault-tolerant operations that should make the universal quantum computation possible.
We analyze the accuracy of quantum phase gates acting on ``0-$\ensuremath{\pi}$ qubits'' in superconducting circuits, where the gates are protected against thermal and Hamiltonian noise by continuous-variable quantum error-correcting codes. The gates are executed by turning on and off a tunable Josephson coupling between an LCLCLC oscillator and a qubit or pair of qubits; assuming perfect qubits, we show that the gate errors are exponentially small when the oscillator's impedance L/C\sqrt{L/C}L/C​ is large compared to $\ensuremath{\hbar}/4{e}^{2}\ensuremath{\approx}1\phantom{\rule{4pt}{0ex}}\mathrm{k}\ensuremath{\Omega}$. The protected gates are not computationally universal by themselves, but a scheme for universal fault-tolerant quantum computation can be constructed by combining them with unprotected noisy operations. We validate our analytic arguments with numerical simulations.
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.