The theory of fault tolerance is a cornerstone of computing and many modern technologies. With the development of quantum science and engineering, fault tolerance has become increasingly important, as quantum systems are intrinsically susceptible to noise. This thesis presents several advances in quantum fault tolerance and develops new connections between fault tolerance and quantum complexity theory. In Part I, we construct a fault-tolerant quantum computation scheme with constant space overhead and near-logarithmic time overhead. This is the lowest overhead achieved to date and and provides the first rigorous proof that fault tolerance based on quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes can achieve better asymptotic spacetime overhead than conventional schemes. The construction relies on locally testable qLDPC codes and new quantum state distillation algorithms with improved spacetime overhead. Additionally, a variant of these algorithms yields the first magic state distillation algorithm with constant space overhead. In Part II, we make progress on the quantum probabilistically checkable proofs (PCP) conjecture by using ideas from fault tolerance. We introduce a new circuit-to-Hamiltonian mapping that allows Hamiltonians to inherit the fault tolerance properties of quantum circuits. Using this new mapping, we construct the first known template for quantum locality-preserving gap amplification---the quantum analogue of a central ingredient in the classical PCP theorem---and prove that it amplifies the combinatorial gap. The construction develops a new framework for reasoning about gap amplification in terms of fault-tolerant distributed computation, along with new tools in secure multiparty computation and high-dimensional expanders.
The theory of fault tolerance is a cornerstone of computing and many modern technologies. With the development of quantum science and engineering, fault tolerance has become increasingly important, as quantum systems are intrinsically susceptible to noise. This thesis presents several advances in quantum fault tolerance and develops new connections between fault tolerance and quantum complexity theory. In Part I, we construct a fault-tolerant quantum computation scheme with constant space overhead and near-logarithmic time overhead. This is the lowest overhead achieved to date and and provides the first rigorous proof that fault tolerance based on quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes can achieve better asymptotic spacetime overhead than conventional schemes. The construction relies on locally testable qLDPC codes and new quantum state distillation algorithms with improved spacetime overhead. Additionally, a variant of these algorithms yields the first magic state distillation algorithm with constant space overhead. In Part II, we make progress on the quantum probabilistically checkable proofs (PCP) conjecture by using ideas from fault tolerance. We introduce a new circuit-to-Hamiltonian mapping that allows Hamiltonians to inherit the fault tolerance properties of quantum circuits. Using this new mapping, we construct the first known template for quantum locality-preserving gap amplification---the quantum analogue of a central ingredient in the classical PCP theorem---and prove that it amplifies the combinatorial gap. The construction develops a new framework for reasoning about gap amplification in terms of fault-tolerant distributed computation, along with new tools in secure multiparty computation and high-dimensional expanders.
Quantum computing offers promising potential for faster computation compared to classical computing, with the advantage of improved scaling as the problem size increases.Many fast quantum algorithms have been developed to solve specific problems using quantum computation, and they are expected to be applied to a wide range of fields, including quantum chemistry, condensed matter physics, and machine learning.However, the high cost of realizing physical systems to perform quantum computations makes resource-efficient implementation methods indispensable.In the first part of this thesis, we study the resource-efficient design of a fault-tolerant protocol based on quantum low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes.Scalable quantum computation to achieve the speed-ups over classical computation requires fault tolerance due to the vulnerability of quantum systems to noise.Fault-tolerant quantum computation (FTQC) expenses significant space and time overheads to achieve fault-tolerant quantum circuits from the original circuits intended to simulate.An FTQC protocol based on quantum LDPC codes has the attractive advantage of constant-space overhead, but has the disadvantage of requiring a long polynomial-time overhead.In this thesis, we present a polylogarithmic time overhead FTQC protocol based on quantum LDPC code, which is exponentially time efficient compared to conventional protocols while maintaining the advantage of the constant space overhead.This overhead is enjoyed even if the non-zero classical computation performing the decoding algorithms is considered.The second part of this thesis investigates the resource-efficient design of variational quantum algorithms (VQAs).The VQAs are a heuristic algorithm with promising applications in various fields.The VQAs can be performed by minimizing task-specific cost functions, typically defined as the expectation values of observables.However, it is known that the execution of variational quantum algorithms requires numerous quantum measurements, and their reduction is a significant challenge in algorithm implementation.In the first study of this part, we propose a new algorithm for calculating nonadiabatic couplings (NACs), which are important quantities in simulating molecular
Fault-tolerant quantum computation traditionally incurs substantial resource overhead, with both qubit and time overheads scaling polylogarithmically with the size of the computation. While prior work by Gottesman showed that constant qubit overhead is achievable under stochastic noise using quantum low-density parity-check (QLDPC) codes, it has remained an open question whether similar guarantees hold under more general, non-stochastic noise models. In this work, we address this question by considering a general circuit-level noise model defined via the diamond norm, which captures both stochastic and non-stochastic noise, including coherent and amplitude damping noise. We prove that constant qubit overhead fault-tolerant quantum computation is achievable in this general setting, using QLDPC codes with constant rate and linear minimum distance. To establish our result, we develop a fault-tolerant error correction scheme and a method for implementing logic gates under general circuit noise. These results extend the theoretical foundations of fault-tolerant quantum computation and offer new directions for fault-tolerant architectures under realistic noise models.
In a model of fault-tolerant quantum computation with quick and noiseless polyloglog-time auxiliary classical computation, we construct a fault tolerance protocol with constant-space and O(logN)-time overhead, where O(⋅) hides sub-polylog factors. Our construction utilizes constant-rate quantum locally testable codes (qLTC), new fault-tolerant gadgets on qLTCs and qLDPC codes, and a new analysis framework. In particular, 1) we develop a new simple and self-contained construction of magic state distillation for qubits using qudit quantum Reed-Solomon codes with (logε1)γ spacetime overhead, where γ→0. 2) We prove that the recent family of almost-good qLTCs of Dinur-Lin-Vidick admit parallel single-shot decoders against adversarial errors of weight scaling with the code distance. 3) We develop logical state preparation and logical gate procedures with O(1)-spacetime overhead on qLTCs. 4) To combine these ingredients, we introduce a new framework of fault tolerance analysis called the weight enumerator formalism. The framework permits easy formal composition of fault-tolerant gadgets, so we expect it to be of independent interest. Our work gives the lowest spacetime overhead to date, which, for the first time, matches that of classical fault tolerance up to sub-polylog factors. We conjecture this is optimal up to sub-polylog factors.
We propose a fault-tolerant quantum computation scheme that is broadly applicable to quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes. The scheme achieves constant qubit overhead and a time overhead of O ( d a + o ( 1 ) ) for any [ [ n , k , d ] ] qLDPC code with constant encoding rate and distance d = Ω ( n 1 / a ) . For good qLDPC codes, the time overhead is minimized and reaches O ( d 1 + o ( 1 ) ) . In contrast, code surgery based on gauging measurement and brute-force branching requires a time overhead of O ( d w 1 + o ( 1 ) ) , where d ≤ w ≤ n . Thus, our scheme is asymptotically faster for all codes with a < 2 . This speedup is achieved by developing techniques that enable parallelized code surgery under constant qubit overhead and leverage classical locally testable codes for efficient resource state preparation. These results establish a new paradigm for accelerating fault-tolerant quantum computation on qLDPC codes, while maintaining low overhead and broad applicability.
The quantum PCP conjecture is one of the major open problems in quantum complexity theory. It has resisted attack in part because many primitives used in the proof of the classical PCP theorem, such as locality-preserving gap amplification and alphabet reduction, have no obvious quantum analogues due to quantum no-cloning. Locality-preserving gap amplification is a procedure that takes as input a local Hamiltonian problem instance and produces a new instance with a larger promise gap, without increasing the locality of the Hamiltonian, and instead moderately increasing its local qudit dimension. Obtaining this kind of control over the locality during gap amplification is critical to the success of many known strategies for proving the classical PCP theorem. In this work, we put forth the first known viable template for quantum locality-preserving gap amplification, and we prove that our procedure amplifies the combinatorial gap of local Hamiltonians. Our work introduces a new framework for reasoning about quantum gap amplification in terms of fault-tolerant computation, and illuminates a route toward importing one of the central ingredients in classical PCPs into the quantum setting. In particular, we build upon ideas from the recent classical PCP of Bafna--Minzer--Vyas based on high-dimensional expanders, and the circuit-to-Hamiltonian construction of Anshu--Breuckmann--Nguyen, in addition to several recent advances in quantum coding theory.
Proving threshold theorems for fault-tolerant quantum computation is a burdensome endeavor with many moving parts that come together in relatively formulaic but lengthy ways. It is difficult and rare to combine elements from multiple papers into a single formal threshold proof, due to the use of different measures of fault-tolerance. In this work, we introduce composable fault-tolerance, a framework that decouples the probabilistic analysis of the noise distribution from the combinatorial analysis of circuit correctness, and enables threshold proofs to compose independently analyzed gadgets easily and rigorously. Within this framework, we provide a library of standard and commonly used gadgets such as memory and logic implemented by constant-depth circuits for quantum low-density parity check codes and distillation. As sample applications, we explicitly write down a threshold proof for computation with surface code and re-derive the constant space-overhead fault-tolerant scheme of Gottesman using gadgets from this library. We expect that future fault-tolerance proofs may focus on the analysis of novel techniques while leaving the standard components to the composable fault-tolerance framework, with the formal proof following the intuitive ``napkin math'' exactly.