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A Critical Review of the Existing Ideas for Fault-tolerant Quantum Computing.

M. I. Dyakonov

Published Aug 9, 2006• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

A critical review of the existing ideas for fault-tolerant quantum computing is presented. It is shown that the underlying mathematics is somewhat detached from the physical reality and that some ideal elements are always present in the proposed constructions.

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In this paper we provide a basic introduction of the core ideas and theories surrounding fault-tolerant quantum computation. These concepts underly the theoretical framework of large-scale quantum computation and communications and are the driving force for many recent experimental efforts to construct small to medium sized arrays of controllable quantum bits. We examine the basic principals of redundant quantum encoding, required to protect quantum bits from errors generated from both imprecise control and environmental interactions and then examine the principals of fault-tolerance from largely a classical framework. As quantum fault-tolerance essentially is avoiding the uncontrollable cascade of errors caused by the interaction of quantum-bits, these concepts can be directly mapped to quantum information.
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Fault-tolerant preparation of logical states is a critical primitive for the realization of large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computing. This paper introduces SpiderCSS, a scalable compilation pipeline that generates highly-optimized, fault-tolerant state preparation circuits for arbitrary Calderbank-Shor-Steane (CSS) codes. Starting from an idealized specification of a CSS state, we use the ZX-calculus and fault-equivalent rewrites to construct a diagram that prepares the given state while preserving the fault tolerance of the initial ideal ZX-diagram. From this diagram, SpiderCSS constructs a fault-tolerant CSS-state preparation circuit using a modular construction that is CNOT-minimal both within each component and also in the way these components are connected together. By only using fault-equivalent rewrites, the final circuit is provably fault-tolerant without needing expensive verification. Monte Carlo simulations across a variety of CSS codes up to distance 15 show that SpiderCSS scales efficiently and constructs circuits with substantially reduced depth and qubit footprint compared to existing scalable and heuristic methods, while simultaneously achieving an average decrease of 33.7% in logical error rate and an increase of 9.5% in acceptance rate.