Institute for Quantum Information Seminar

Series: Institute for Quantum Information Seminar

Error models in quantum computation: an application of model selection

Steven van Enk, Professor, University of Oregon,

Threshold theorems for fault-tolerant quantum computing assume that errors are of certain types. But how would one detect whether errors of the ``wrong'' type occur in one's experiment, especially if one does not even know what type of error to look for? The problem is that for many qubits a full state description is impossible to analyze, and a full process description is even more impossible to analyze. As a result, one simply cannot detect all types of errors.

Here we show through a quantum state estimation example (on up to 25 qubits) how to attack this problem using model selection. We use, in particular, the Akaike Information Criterion. The example also indicates that the number of measurements that one has to perform before noticing errors of the wrong type scales polynomially both with the number of qubits and with the error size.

This is joint work with Lucia Schwarz.

Event Sponsors:

Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy - More events from this Sponsor

For more information, please contact Ann Harvey by phone at 626-395-4964 or by email at [email protected] or visit Institute for Quantum Information Seminar.