Decoherence, Inaccuracy and Errors in Quantum Cryptography

Masahito Hayashi, Satoshi Ishizaka, Akinori Kawachi +2 more

El Ashmawy, Mohamed Salah

Kevin Obenland, Alvin M. Despain

Feng Zhao, Mingxing Fu, Faqiang Wang +3 more

Kevin Obenland, Alvin M. Despain

A Quantum Computer is a new type of computer which can solve problems such as factoring and database search very efficiently. The usefulness of a quantum computer is limited by the effect of two different types of errors, decoherence and inaccuracies. In this paper we show the results of simulations of a quantum computer which consider both decoherence and inaccuracies. We simulate circuits which factor the numbers 15, 21, 35, and 57 as well as circuits which use database search to solve the circuit satisfaction problem. Our simulations show that the error rate per gate is on the order of 10^-6 for a trapped ion quantum computer whose noise is kept below pi/4096 per gate and with a decoherence rate of 10^-6. This is an important bound because previous studies have shown that a quantum computer can factor more efficiently than a classical computer if the error rate is of order 10^-6.

Peter W. Shor

It has recently been realized that use of the properties of quantum mechanics might speed up certain computations dramatically. Interest in quantum computation has since been growing. One of the main difficulties in realizing quantum computation is that decoherence tends to destroy the information in a superposition of states in a quantum computer making long computations impossible. A further difficulty is that inaccuracies in quantum state transformations throughout the computation accumulate, rendering long computations unreliable. However, these obstacles may not be as formidable as originally believed. For any quantum computation with t gates, we show how to build a polynomial size quantum circuit that tolerates O(1/log/sup c/t) amounts of inaccuracy and decoherence per gate, for some constant c; the previous bound was O(1/t). We do this by showing that operations can be performed on quantum data encoded by quantum error-correcting codes without decoding this data.