Impacts of Noise and Structure on Quantum Information Encoded in a Quantum Memory

TL;DR

This paper investigates how noise and structural differences in quantum memories affect the preservation of quantum information, providing formulas for comparing their lifetimes to aid in designing hybrid quantum systems.

Contribution

It introduces analytical formulas and numerical simulations to compare the impact of noise on various quantum memory structures, including qubit and qudit systems.

Findings

Derived simple formulas for quantum information lifetimes in different memories

Compared noise effects across various quantum hardware structures

Provided insights for designing hybrid quantum devices

Abstract

As larger, higher-quality quantum devices are built and demonstrated in quantum information applications, such as quantum computation and quantum communication, the need for high-quality quantum memories to store quantum states becomes ever more pressing. Future quantum devices likely will use a variety of physical hardware, some being used primarily for processing of quantum information and others for storage. Here, we study the correlation of the structure of quantum information with physical noise models of various possible quantum memory implementations. Through numerical simulation of different noise models and approximate analytical formulas applied to a variety of interesting quantum states, we provide comparisons between quantum hardware with different structure, including both qubit- and qudit-based quantum memories. Our findings point to simple, experimentally relevant formulas for the relative lifetimes of quantum information in different quantum memories and have relevance to the design of hybrid quantum devices.