Demonstration of qubit operations below a rigorous fault tolerance threshold with gate set tomography
Quantum information processors promise fast algorithms for problems inaccessible to classical computers. But since qubits are noisy and error-prone, they will depend on fault-tolerant quantum error correction (FTQEC) to compute reliably. Quantum error correction can protect against general noise if—...
Saved in:
Published in | Nature communications Vol. 8; no. 1; pp. 1 - 13 |
---|---|
Main Authors | , , , , , , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
London
Nature Publishing Group UK
15.02.2017
Nature Publishing Group Nature Portfolio |
Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
Cover
Loading…
Summary: | Quantum information processors promise fast algorithms for problems inaccessible to classical computers. But since qubits are noisy and error-prone, they will depend on fault-tolerant quantum error correction (FTQEC) to compute reliably. Quantum error correction can protect against general noise if—and only if—the error in each physical qubit operation is smaller than a certain threshold. The threshold for general errors is quantified by their diamond norm. Until now, qubits have been assessed primarily by randomized benchmarking, which reports a different error rate that is not sensitive to all errors, and cannot be compared directly to diamond norm thresholds. Here we use gate set tomography to completely characterize operations on a trapped-Yb
+
-ion qubit and demonstrate with greater than 95% confidence that they satisfy a rigorous threshold for FTQEC (diamond norm ≤6.7 × 10
−4
).
Quantum computation will depend on fault-tolerant error correction, which requires the chance for errors to occur to be below a certain threshold. Here the authors use gate set tomography as a means to rigorously characterize error rates of single-qubit operations of a qubit encoded in a trapped ion. |
---|---|
Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 AC04-94AL85000 Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) (United States) SAND-2016-4951J USDOE Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Program USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Present address: Joint Quantum Institute, University of Maryland, Department of Physics and National Institute of Standards and Technology, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA |
ISSN: | 2041-1723 2041-1723 |
DOI: | 10.1038/ncomms14485 |