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arXiv:quant-ph/0112179 · Physical Review Letters

Conservative Quantum Computing

Masanao Ozawa

Published Jul 16, 2002• 78 citations
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Abstract

The Wigner-Araki-Yanase theorem shows that conservation laws limit the accuracy of measurement. Here, we generalize the argument to show that conservation laws limit the accuracy of quantum logic operations. A rigorous lower bound is obtained of the error probability of any physical realization of the controlled-NOT gate under the constraint that the computational basis is represented by a component of spin, and that physical implementations obey the angular momentum conservation law. The lower bound is shown to be inversely proportional to the number of ancilla qubits or the strength of the external control field.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.89.057902

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The Wigner-Araki-Yanase theorem shows that conservation laws limit the accuracy of measurement. Here, we generalize the argument to show that conservation laws limit the accuracy of quantum logic operations. A rigorous lower bound is obtained of the error probability of any physical realization of the controlled-NOT gate under the constraint that the computational basis is represented by a component of spin, and that physical implementations obey the angular momentum conservation law. The lower bound is shown to be inversely proportional to the number of ancilla qubits or the strength of the external control field.
The Wigner-Araki-Yanase theorem shows that conservation laws limit the accuracy of measurement.Here, we generalize the argument to show that conservation laws limit the accuracy of quantum logic operations.A rigorous lower bound is obtained of the error probability of any physical realization of the controlled-NOT gate under the constraint that the computational basis is represented by a component of spin and that physical implementations obey the angular momentum conservation law.The lower bound is shown to be inversely proportional to the number of ancilla qubits or the strength of the external control field.
The notion of quantum instruments is formalized as statistical equivalence classes of all the possible quantum measurements and mathematically characterized as normalized completely positive map valued measures under naturally acceptable axioms. Recently, universally valid uncertainty relations have been established to set a precision limit for any instruments given a disturbance constraint in a form more general than the one originally proposed by Heisenberg. One of them leads to a quantitative generalization of the Wigner–Araki–Yanase theorem on the precision limit of measurements under conservation laws. Applying this, a rigorous lower bound is obtained for the gate error probability of physical implementations of Hadamard gates on a standard qubit of a spin 1/2 system by interactions with control fields or ancilla systems obeying the angular momentum conservation law.
It is important to improve the accuracy of quantum measurements and operations both in engineering and fundamental physics. It is known, however, that the achievable accuracy of measurements and unitary operations are generally limited by conservation laws according to the Wigner-Araki-Yanase theorem (WAY theorem) and its generalizations. Although many researches have extended the WAY theorem quantitatively, most of them, as well as the original WAY theorem, concern only additive conservation laws like the angular momentum conservation law. In this paper, we explore the limitation incurred by the energy conservation law, which is universal but is one of the non-additive conservation laws. We present a lower bound for the error of a quantum measurement using a scattering process satisfying the energy conservation law. We obtain conditions that a control system Hamiltonian must fulfill in order to implement a controlled unitary gate with zero error when a scattering process is considered. We also show the quantitative relationship between the upper bound of the gate fidelity of a controlled unitary gate and the energy fluctuation of systems when a target system and a control system are both one qubit.
In recent investigations, it has been found that conservation laws generally lead to precision limits on quantum computing. Lower bounds of the error probability have been obtained for various logic operations from the commutation relation between the noise operator and the conserved quantity or from the recently developed universal uncertainty principle for the noise-disturbance trade-off in general measurements. However, the problem of obtaining the precision limit to realizing the quantum NOT gate has eluded a solution from these approaches. Here, we develop a method for this problem based on analyzing the trace distance between the output state from the realization under consideration and the one from the ideal gate. Using the mathematical apparatus of orthogonal polynomials, we obtain a general lower bound on the error probability for the realization of the quantum NOT gate in terms of the number of qubits in the control system under conservation of the total angular momentum of the computational qubit plus the control system along the direction used to encode the computational basis. The lower bound turns out to be more stringent than one might expect from previous results. Our method is expected to lead to more accurate estimates for physical realizations of various types of quantum computations under conservation laws and to contribute to related problems such as the accuracy of programmable quantum processors.
The Wigner-Araki-Yanase (WAY) theorem is a well-known theorem regarding limitations of quantum measurement in the presence of additive conservation laws. Under the assumptions of the von Neumann measurement model, for which the system conserved quantity LSL_{S}LS​ is bounded, given a conserved total additive system plus apparatus quantity LSAL_{SA}LSA​, the measurement operator ESE_{S}ES​ must commute with LSL_{S}LS​. Prior proofs have exploited the properties of unitary evolution constrained by momentum conserving operations that tend to obscure the physical nature of the WAY theorem and as well lead to bounds on performance. As it is generally agreed that momentum is always exactly conserved in measurement, we instead develop a general angular momentum conserving model of measurement. This model is shown to lead to a simple explanation of the major implications of the WAY theorem and provides exact results of the effects of measurement based on the apparatus model. This is shown by both tracing the apparatus from the density matrix and also via a system-only channel model based on Kraus operators.