Analysis of errors in linear-optics quantum computation

Christoph Adami, Nicolas J. Cerf

Shigeki Takeuchi

The origin of errors in quantum computation implemented by linear optics is studied. The systematic errors of quantum gates, phase relaxation, amplitude dumping, and misreadout are considered as error sources, and the errors which occurred in a four-bit Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm experiment are categorized according to the sources. The increase in the error rate with the expansion of the input size in the Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm is also studied and it was found that the demonstration of 11 qubits using linear optics and a single photon with less than a 20% error rate is achievable by the technique used in the experiment.

Nobuyuki Matsuda

A. G. Hayes

Quantum computing is an exciting field that promises great improvements to our ability to solve certain intractable classes of problem. Implementing a quantum computer will require a physical system in which quantum effects are strongly evident. Many different physical systems have been proposed for this task, including ion traps, quantum dots, neutral atoms and photons. This thesis focuses on optical implementations of a quantum computer, and specifically on single-photon designs, as opposed to those utilising coherent states. Photonic systems have shown a great deal of promise for quantum computing tasks since it was shown by Knill, Laflamme and Milburn (KLM) that scalable efficient quantum computing could be performed using only linear optical elements and measurement. This was made viable through the use of error-correcting codes. The work in this thesis covers the use of error-correcting codes in single-photon linear optics quantum computing (LOQC). The central feature of these schemes is the parity code introduced by KLM and used to overcome the gate errors that are inherent in this type of LOQC. First is a discussion of an improved scheme that incorporates the fusion gates used in Browne and Rudolph's cluster state proposal in order to simplify the encoding and gate procedures. This results in high-probability gates with a resource usage comparable to the cluster state schemes. The remainder of the thesis examines the application of further error correcting codes to handle other errors that may arise in any practical implementation of an optical quantum computer. The most significant type of error in any optical system is photon loss, and hence an extension of the parity code is presented that allows loss errors to be detected and corrected. Procedures for performing universal quantum computation whilst employing this encoding are also described. These enable the establishment of loss thresholds for parity-state based LOQC, revealing this code is capable of handling up to 10\% loss in all elements during general computation, or 17\% if it is used solely as an active memory. Although loss is the most common type of optical error, other types of error will also become an issue when attempting to produce large quantum computing systems. An analysis of the error thresholds and resource usage which can be expected when applying a general error correcting code such as the Steane code to this type of LOQC system is also presented. The error thresholds and resource requirements established are greater than those found for cat state optical quantum computing, but fall below those calculated for cluster states. However, the resource requirements of the scheme are significantly smaller than the cluster state requirements for an equivalent circuit. Finally, a new experiment is proposed, achievable with today's technology, for testing the loss-tolerant encoding described earlier. Expansions of the experiment that would demonstrate tolerance of actual experimental error are also discussed.

Seungbeom Chin, Joonsuk Huh

Abstract This work shows that the majorization of photon distributions is related to the runtime of classically simulating multimode passive linear optics, which explains one aspect of the boson sampling hardness. A Shur-concave quantity which we name the Boltzmann entropy of elementary quantum complexity ( ) is introduced to present some quantitative analysis of the relation between the majorization and the classical runtime for simulating linear optics. We compare with two quantities that are important criteria for understanding the computational cost of the photon scattering process, (the runtime for the classical simulation of linear optics) and (the additive error bound for an approximated amplitude estimator). First, for all the known algorithms for computing the permanents of matrices with repeated rows and columns, the runtime becomes shorter as the input and output distribution vectors are more majorized. Second, the error bound decreases as the majorization difference of input and output states increases. We expect that our current results would help in understanding the feature of linear optical networks from the perspective of quantum computation.

Gerard J Milburn, Timothy C. Ralph, Alexei Gilchrist +3 more