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Threshold theorem in isolated quantum dynamics with local stochastic control errors

Manaka Okuyama, Kentaro Ohki, Masayuki Ohzeki

Published Sep 23, 2020• 1 citation
OpenAlex

Abstract

We investigate the effect of local stochastic control errors in the time-dependent Hamiltonian on isolated quantum dynamics. The control errors are formulated as time-dependent stochastic noise in the Schrodinger equation. For any local stochastic control errors, we establish a threshold theorem that provides a sufficient condition to obtain the target state, which should be determined in noiseless isolated quantum dynamics, as a relation between the number of measurements required and noise strength. The theorem guarantees that if the sum of the noise strengths is less than the inverse of computational time, the target state can be obtained through a constant-order number of measurements. If the opposite is true, the required number of measurements increases exponentially with computational time. Our threshold theorem can be applied to any isolated quantum dynamics such as quantum annealing, adiabatic quantum computation, the quantum approximate optimization algorithm, and the quantum circuit model.

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We investigate the effect of local stochastic control errors in the time-dependent Hamiltonian on isolated quantum dynamics. The control errors are formulated as time-dependent stochastic noise in the Schrodinger equation. For any local stochastic control errors, we establish a threshold theorem that provides a sufficient condition to obtain the target state, which should be determined in noiseless isolated quantum dynamics, as a relation between the number of measurements required and noise strength. The theorem guarantees that if the sum of the noise strengths is less than the inverse of computational time, the target state can be obtained through a constant-order number of measurements. If the opposite is true, the required number of measurements increases exponentially with computational time. Our threshold theorem can be applied to any isolated quantum dynamics such as quantum annealing, adiabatic quantum computation, the quantum approximate optimization algorithm, and the quantum circuit model.
We investigate the effect of stochastic control errors in the time-dependent Hamiltonian on isolated quantum dynamics. The control errors are formulated as time-dependent stochastic noise in the Schrödinger equation. For a class of stochastic control errors, we establish a threshold theorem that provides a sufficient condition to obtain the target state, which should be determined in noiseless isolated quantum dynamics, as a relation between the number of measurements and noise strength. The theorem guarantees that if the sum of the noise strengths is less than the inverse of computational time, the target state can be obtained through a constant-order number of measurements. If the opposite is true, the number of measurements to guarantee obtaining the target state increases exponentially with computational time. Our threshold theorem can be applied to any isolated quantum dynamics such as quantum annealing and adiabatic quantum computation. This article is part of the theme issue 'Quantum annealing and computation: challenges and perspectives'.
We investigate the effect of deterministic analog control errors in the time-dependent Hamiltonian on isolated quantum dynamics. Deterministic analog control errors are formulated as time-dependent operators in the Schrodinger equation. We give an upper bound on the distance between two states in time evolution with and without deterministic analog control errors. As a result, we prove that, if the strength of deterministic analog control errors is less than the inverse of computational time, the final state in quantum dynamics without deterministic analog control errors can be obtained through a constant-order number of measurements in quantum dynamics with deterministic analog control errors.
We analyze the long-time behavior of a quantum computer running a quantum error correction (QEC) code in the presence of a correlated environment. Starting from a Hamiltonian formulation of realistic noise models, and assuming that QEC is indeed possible, we find formal expressions for the probability of a given syndrome history and the associated residual decoherence encoded in the reduced density matrix. Systems with nonzero gate times (``long gates'') are included in our analysis by using an upper bound on the noise. In order to introduce the local error probability for a qubit, we assume that propagation of signals through the environment is slower than the QEC period (hypercube assumption). This allows an explicit calculation in the case of a generalized spin-boson model and a quantum frustration model. The key result is a dimensional criterion: If the correlations decay sufficiently fast, the system evolves toward a stochastic error model for which the threshold theorem of fault-tolerant quantum computation has been proven. On the other hand, if the correlations decay slowly, the traditional proof of this threshold theorem does not hold. This dimensional criterion bears many similarities to criteria that occur in the theory of quantum phase transitions.
Computers have led society to the information age revolutionizing central aspects of our lives from production and communication to education and entertainment. There exist, however, important problems which are intractable with the computers available today and, experience teaches us, will remain so even with the more advanced computers we can envision for tomorrow. Quantum computers promise speedups to some of these important but classically intractable problems. Simulating physical systems, a problem of interest in a diverse range of areas from testing physical theories to understanding chemical reactions, and solving number factoring, a problem at the basis of cryptographic protocols that are used widely today on the internet, are examples of applications for which quantum computers, when built, will offer a great advantage over what is possible with classical computer technology. The construction of a quantum computer of sufficient scale to solve interesting problems is, however, especially challenging. The reason for this is that, by its very nature, operating a quantum computer will require the coherent control of the quantum state of a very large number of particles. Fortunately, the theory of quantum error correction and fault-tolerant quantum computation gives us confidence that such quantum states can be created, can be stored in memory and can also be manipulated provided the quantum computer can be isolated to a sufficient degree from sources of noise. One of the central results in the theory of fault-tolerant quantum computation, the quantum threshold theorem shows that a noisy quantum computer can accurately and efficiently simulate any ideal quantum computation provided that noise is weakly correlated and its strength is below a critical value known as the quantum accuracy threshold. This thesis provides a simpler and more transparent non-inductive proof of this theorem based on the concept of level reduction. This concept is also used in proving the quantum threshold theorem for coherent and leakage noise and for quantum computation by measurements. In addition, the proof provides a methodology which allows us to establish improved rigorous lower bounds on the value of the quantum accuracy threshold.
We prove an adiabatic theorem that applies at time scales short of the typical adiabatic limit. Our proof analyses the stability of solutions to Schrodinger’s equation under perturbation. We directly characterize cross-subspace effects of perturbation, which are typically significantly less than suggested by the perturbation’s operator norm. This stability has numerous consequences: we can (1) find time scales where the solution of Schrodinger’s equation converges to the ground state of a subspace, (2) lower bound the convergence to the global ground state by demonstrating convergence to some other known quantum state, (3) guarantee faster convergence than the standard adiabatic theorem when the ground state of the perturbed Hamiltonian is close to that of the unperturbed Hamiltonian and (4) bound leakage effects in terms of the global spectral gap when the Hamiltonian is ‘stoquastic’ (a Z -matrix). Our results can help explain quantum annealing protocols that exhibit faster convergence than is guaranteed by a standard adiabatic theorem. Our upper and lower bounds demonstrate that at time scales short of the adiabatic limit, subspace dynamics can dominate over global dynamics. Thus, we see that when our results apply, convergence to particular global target states can be understood as the result of local dynamics.
We study fault-tolerant quantum computation using a fixed, local error-correction rule and a geometrically simple code: the cubical (d,d′)(d,d')(d,d′)-Toric code with d′,d−d′≥2d',d-d'\geq 2d′,d−d′≥2, including the 4D Toric code. Under sufficiently weak local-stochastic Pauli noise, our construction uses noiseless, bounded-depth classical processing per physical time step. Its correction cycle acts only on the current syndrome, has constant depth, and is repeated unchanged during idle logical computation; it requires neither multiscale decoder states nor scale-dependent communication delays. Our proof treats errors and syndromes as chains in a cubical complex, combining geometric shrinking under the sweep rule with a space--time explanation-tree argument inspired by Toom's theorem. It does not rely on expansion. We establish three results: 1.Explicit higher-dimensional sweep rule. We give a local algorithm for choosing sweep corrections on cubical (d,d′)(d,d')(d,d′)-Toric complexes, resolving the local-existence question of Kubica and Preskill. 2. Fault-tolerant computation. We prove a circuit-level threshold theorem for noisy sweep cycles interleaved with logical gates. In particular, the 4D Toric code admits a fixed, constant-depth syndrome-based correction cycle without a multiscale decoder or expansion-based encoding. We do not claim constant total-depth overhead. 3. Ideal decoding under local-stochastic noise. For an initial local-stochastic Pauli error of rate ppp below threshold, nd+1n^{d+1}nd+1 noiseless sweep cycles recover the encoded state on a side-length-nnn (d,d′)(d,d')(d,d′)-Toric code with probability at least 1−O(poly⁡(n))pΩ(n)1-O(\operatorname{poly}(n))p^{Ω(n)}1−O(poly(n))pΩ(n), extending earlier guarantees for independent errors.