Fully fault tolerant quantum computation with non-deterministic gates

TL;DR

This paper establishes fault-tolerance thresholds for quantum computing architectures with highly unreliable, non-deterministic gates, showing that scalable quantum computation is feasible even with failure rates over 90% if failures are heralded.

Contribution

It derives new fault-tolerance thresholds for quantum computing with non-deterministic, failure-prone gates, expanding the understanding of fault tolerance in distributed quantum systems.

Findings

Supports quantum computation with failure rates over 90% if failures are heralded

Unknown error rate must be below 2 in 10^4 operations

Provides thresholds for fault-tolerant quantum computation in extreme paradigms

Abstract

In certain approaches to quantum computing the operations between qubits are non-deterministic and likely to fail. For example, a distributed quantum processor would achieve scalability by networking together many small components; operations between components should assumed to be failure prone. In the logical limit of this architecture each component contains only one qubit. Here we derive thresholds for fault tolerant quantum computation under such extreme paradigms. We find that computation is supported for remarkably high failure rates (exceeding 90%) providing that failures are heralded, meanwhile the rate of unknown errors should not exceed 2 in 10^4 operations.