High photon-loss threshold quantum computing using GHZ-state measurements

This thesis presents the development of resource-efficient photon-distillation schemes designed to produce highly indistinguishable photons, a key requirement for large-scale photonic quantum computing. Although photons do not naturally interact, their indistinguishability enables effective interactions through quantum interference, allowing entanglement generation using only linear optical elements and measurements. In practice, however, photons are never perfectly identical. Small differences introduce decoherence, limiting the scalability and reliability of photonic quantum technologies. Addressing indistinguishability errors is therefore essential for fault-tolerant quantum computing.<br/><br/>The thesis first reviews the importance of photon indistinguishability and the need to mitigate related errors. It then examines experimental methods for characterizing imperfections and introduces a general model of imperfect photon states. This model captures indistinguishability errors alongside additional experimental noise from photon loss and multiphoton events. A key insight is that loss and multiphoton noise together can act as an effective source of indistinguishability error. To quantify this effect, the work defines an effective indistinguishability metric, enabling practical evaluation of photon-distillation schemes under realistic conditions.<br/><br/>The core theoretical contribution is the development of photon-distillation protocols based on multiphoton Fourier interference. Unlike earlier approaches, these schemes can asymptotically suppress indistinguishability errors to arbitrary levels while requiring only linear scaling in photon resources relative to the desired error reduction. The analysis further suggests that photon distillation, when combined with quantum error correction, can significantly reduce the overall resource overhead for fault-tolerant photonic quantum computing.<br/><br/>Experimentally, a three-photon Fourier-based distillation protocol was demonstrated on a high-fidelity photonic processor using a resonantly driven quantum-dot single-photon source. After subtracting excess noise contributions, a 2.2-fold reduction in indistinguishability error was achieved; when excess noise was retained, a 1.2-fold net reduction was observed. These results confirm a clear below-threshold improvement in photon quality. Additional analysis suggests that optimized distillation schemes could reduce the photon cost of a logical qubit by up to a factor of four. The thesis concludes by addressing insertion loss and outlining design strategies and future directions for integrating photon-distillation components into scalable quantum architectures.

This paper shows that quantum computation can be made fault-tolerant against errors and inaccuracies when $\eta$, the probability for an error in a qubit or a gate, is smaller than a constant threshold $\eta_c$. This result improves on Shor's result [Proceedings of the 37th Symposium on the Foundations of Computer Science, IEEE, Los Alamitos, CA, 1996, pp. 56–65], which shows how to perform fault-tolerant quantum computation when the error rate $\eta$ decays polylogarithmically with the size of the computation, an assumption which is physically unreasonable. The cost of making the quantum circuit fault-tolerant in our construction is polylogarithmic in time and space. Our result holds for a very general local noise model, which includes probabilistic errors, decoherence, amplitude damping, depolarization, and systematic inaccuracies in the gates. Moreover, we allow exponentially decaying correlations between the errors both in space and in time. Fault-tolerant computation can be performed with any universal set of gates. The result also holds for quantum particles with $p>2$ states, namely, p-qudits, and is also generalized to one-dimensional quantum computers with only nearest-neighbor interactions. No measurements, or classical operations, are required during the quantum computation. We estimate the threshold of our construction to be $\eta_c\simeq 10^{-6}$, in the best case. By this we show that local noise is in principle not an obstacle for scalable quantum computation. The main ingredient of our proof is the computation on states encoded by a quantum error correcting code (QECC). To this end we introduce a special class of Calderbank–Shor–Steane (CSS) codes, called polynomial codes (the quantum analogue of Reed–Solomon codes). Their nice algebraic structure allows all of the encoded gates to be transversal. We also provide another version of the proof which uses more general CSS codes, but its encoded gates are slightly less elegant. To achieve fault tolerance, we encode the quantum circuit by another circuit by using one of these QECCs. This step is repeated polyloglog many times, each step slightly improving the effective error rate, to achieve the desired reliability. The resulting circuit exhibits a hierarchical structure, and for the analysis of its robustness we borrow terminology from Khalfin and Tsirelson [Found. Phys., 22 (1992), pp. 879–948] and Gács [Advances in Computing Research: A Research Annual: Randomness and Computation, JAI Press, Greenwich, CT, 1989]. The paper is to a large extent self-contained. In particular, we provide simpler proofs for many of the known results we use, such as the fact that it suffices to correct for bit-flips and phase-flips, the correctness of CSS codes, and the fact that two-qubit gates are universal, together with their extensions to higher-dimensional particles. We also provide full proofs of the universality of the sets of gates we use (the proof of universality was missing in Shor's paper). This paper thus provides a self-contained and complete proof of universal fault-tolerant quantum computation in the presence of local noise.

<p indent="0mm">Recently, the achievement, entitled “lifetime enhancement for a logic qubit by bosonic encoding error correction”, has been selected as one of “The Ten Major Advances in Chinese Science 2023”. Here, we will introduce briefly the importance of this work. It is known that quantum states are fragile due to decoherence induced by environment. Error will happen on a qubit, resulting in continuously changes of the parameters for this qubit, such as amplitude and phase parameters. The aim of quantum error correction is to amend those errors by using various quantum error correction codes, in which a logic qubit can be represented by several physical qubits. It should be noted that the quantum error correction can be realized by correcting a discrete set of errors, such as bit-flip error, phase-flip error or both of them. On the other hand, types of errors occurred depend on specific platforms of quantum computation. For example, photon loss is more inclined to occur in photonic systems. In this case, the approach of bosonic encoding of quantum error correction is more efficient. The work “lifetime enhancement for a logic qubit by bosonic encoding error correction” is for such a scenario. The challenge of quantum error correction is that operation itself is not perfect which may incur new errors. So it is actually difficult to demonstrate that we can benefit from quantum error correction. The achievement of lifetime enhancement by bosonic encoding error correction succeeds in beating this break-even point. The experiments are performed by circuit quantum electrodynamics on a superconducting processor with a qubit and a coupled resonate cavity. The logic qubit is realized by the bosonic mode of the cavity, while the superconducting qubit plays the role of the ancillary qubit in error correction. The initial states are prepared by the superconducting qubit, and are transferred to the logic qubit in the cavity. Then the error correction can be performed based on detection of photon loss by the superconducting qubit. The results show that the lifetime of the logic qubit increases from <sc>694 μs</sc> to <sc>805 μs</sc> with 16% enhancement. Besides high quality devices, the success of this experiment depends on the feedback control to detect and correct the error of photon loss in a short time. The result of beating the break-even point of bosonic encoding error correction is for one logic qubit. In the near future, it is hopeful to implement logic gates, such as single-qubit rotation gate and two-qubit gate, on a couple of logic qubits by bosonic encoding. The importance of the results will depend on whether higher fidelity can be achieved compared with those of gates with physical qubits. In this way, the advantage of the logic qubits for quantum computation is presented. It will be significant that the approach of bosonic encoding with a superconducting processor is scalable to hundreds of logic qubits, which may take a few years to realize. Our aim is to realize a fault-tolerant universal quantum computer based on a large quantity of high-precision logic qubits. The work “lifetime enhancement for a logic qubit by bosonic encoding error correction” is an important step toward this aim.

A quantum computer is a powerful machine that provides a new approach to information processing based on quantum mechanics. However, basically, qubits are very vulnerable to errors, thus a quantum error correction code (QECC) is needed to build a reliable quantum computer. Moreover, simply using QECCs is not sufficient in order that a quantum computer can tolerate errors. In quantum computation, each operation must be performed on the encoded states. Even when the gates used to perform these operations are noisy, the quantum computation must be tolerable to the errors. This is called fault-tolerant quantum computation and it is an essential condition for implementing a quantum computer. However, considering the fault tolerance, the overhead of the quantum computer increases exponentially. In this paper, we introduce fault-tolerant quantum computation and schemes to reduce the its overhead.

Developing quantum systems which are robust against noise are of prime importance to the realisation of quantum technologies. Without fault tolerance, we will never be able to preserve delicate quantum states for macroscopic time scales, a necessary requirement in the construction of scalable quantum computer. Topologically ordered models offer very beautiful mechanisms for preserving quantum states. In such models, quantum information is encoded globally over a degenerate topological Hilbert space which offers a natural robustness against local environmental noise. Remarkably, topological order is present in certain realistic condensed-matter systems. This provides a platform for accessing topological order in a laboratory. Moreover, considering condensed-matter systems enables us to combine topological features with other physical effects to enhance their behaviour. In this Thesis we study the physics of topologically ordered lattice models with defects. We seek practical applications of lattice defects for the realisation of a fault-tolerant quantum computer. The first result we present shows that anyonic data of point-like lattice defects, called twists, can be found by measuring the entanglement of the ground state of the host system. The data we learn relates to the capacity of a twist defect to perform quantum computational tasks. The second result in this Thesis concerns the dynamics of the qudit toric code model with line-like defects coupled to a thermal bath. We show we can entropically inspire fragile glassy dynamics in the system. Such dynamics qualitatively improve the coherence times of quantum information encoded in the ground state of the lattice. A novel way of achieving fault-tolerant quantum computation is by producing and manipulating twist defects of topologically ordered systems. In many ways, this paradigm of topological quantum computation is analogous to quantum computation using anyons. The first area of study in this Thesis extends the analogy between anyons and twists. Specifically, we show that the anyonic data of twists in Kitaev’s toric code model can be extracted

During recent years, quantum computers have received increasing attention, primarily due to their ability to significantly increase computational performance for specific problems. Computational performance could be improved for mathematical optimization by quantum annealers. This special type of quantum computer can solve quadratic unconstrained binary optimization problems. However, multi-energy systems optimization commonly involves integer and continuous decision variables. Due to their mixed-integer problem structure, quantum annealers cannot be directly used for multi-energy system optimization.To solve multi-energy system optimization problems, we present a hybrid Benders decomposition approach combining optimization on quantum and classical computers. In our approach, the quantum computer solves the master problem, which involves only the integer variables from the original energy system optimization problem. The subproblem includes the continuous variables and is solved by a classical computer. For better performance, we apply improvement techniques to the Benders decomposition. We test the approach on a case study to design a cost-optimal multi-energy system. While we provide a proof of concept that our Benders decomposition approach is applicable for the design of multi-energy systems, the computational time is still higher than for approaches using classical computers only. We therefore estimate the potential improvement of our approach to be expected for larger and fault-tolerant quantum computers.

Continuous-variable measurement-based quantum computation, which requires deterministically generated large-scale cluster states, is a promising candidate for practical, scalable, universal, and fault-tolerant quantum computation. In this work, based on our compact and scalable scheme of generating a two-dimensional spatiotemporal cluster state, a complete architecture including cluster state preparation, gate implementations, and error correction, is proposed. First, a scheme for generating two-dimensional large-scale continuous-variable cluster state by multiplexing both the temporal and spatial domains is proposed. Then, the corresponding gate implementations by gate teleportation are discussed and the actual gate noise from the generated cluster state is considered. After that, the quantum error correction can be further achieved by utilizing the square-lattice Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) code. Finally, a fault-tolerant quantum computation can be realized by introducing bias into the square-lattice GKP code (to protect against phase-flip errors) and concatenating a repetition code (to handle the residual bit-flip errors), with a squeezing threshold of 12.3 dB. Our work provides a possible option for a complete fault-tolerant quantum computation architecture in the future.

Fault-tolerant quantum error correction provides a strategy to protect information processed by a quantum computer against noise which would otherwise corrupt the data. A fault-tolerant universal quantum computer must implement a universal gate set on the logical level in order to perform arbitrary calculations to in principle unlimited precision. In this paper we characterize the recent demonstration of a fault-tolerant universal gate set in a trapped-ion quantum computer [Postler et al., Nature (London) 605, 7911 (2022)] and identify aspects to improve the design of experimental setups to reach an advantage of logical over physical qubit operation. We show that various criteria to assess the break-even point for fault-tolerant quantum operations are within reach for the ion trap quantum computing architecture under consideration. Furthermore, we analyze the influence of crosstalk in entangling gates for logical state preparation circuits. These circuits can be designed to respect fault tolerance for specific microscopic noise models. We find that an experimentally informed depolarizing noise model captures the essential noise dynamics of the fault-tolerant experiment that we consider, and crosstalk is negligible in the currently accessible regime of physical error rates. For deterministic Pauli state preparation, we provide a fault-tolerant unitary logical qubit initialization circuit, which can be realized without in-sequence measurement and feed-forward of classical information. Additionally, we show that nondeterministic state preparation schemes, i.e., repeat until success, for logical Pauli and magic states perform with higher logical fidelity over their deterministic counterparts for the current and anticipated future regime of physical error rates. Our results offer guidance on improvements of physical qubit operations and validate the experimentally informed noise model as a tool to predict logical failure rates in quantum computing architectures based on trapped ions.

From the Publisher: This book aims to provide a pedagogical introduction to the subjects of quantum information and computation. Topics include non-locality of quantum mechanics, quantum computation, quantum cryptography, quantum error correction, fault-tolerant quantum computation as well as some experimental aspects of quantum computation and quantum cryptography. Only knowledge of basic quantum mechanics is assumed. Whenever more advanced concepts and techniques are used, they are introduced carefully. This book is meant to be a self-contained overview. While basic concepts are discussed in detail, unnecessary technical details are excluded. It is well-suited for a wide audience ranging from physics graduate students to advanced researchers.

Certain physical systems that one might consider for fault-tolerant quantum computing where qubits do not readily interact, for instance photons, are better suited for measurement-based quantum-computational protocols. Here we propose a measurement-based model for universal quantum computation that simulates the braiding and fusion of Majorana modes. To derive our model we develop a general framework that maps any scheme of fault-tolerant quantum computation with stabilizer codes into the measurement-based picture. As such, our framework gives an explicit way of producing fault-tolerant models of universal quantum computation with linear optics using protocols developed using the stabilizer formalism. Given the remarkable fault-tolerant properties that Majorana modes promise, the main example we present offers a robust and resource efficient proposal for photonic quantum computation.

Hybrid entangled states are crucial in quantum physics, offering significant benefits for hybrid quantum communication and quantum computation, and then the conversion of hybrid entangled states is equally critical. This paper presents two novel schemes, that is, one converts the two-qubit hybrid Knill–Laflamme–Milburn (KLM) entangled state into Bell states and the other one transforms the three-qubit hybrid KLM state into Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger (GHZ) states assisted by error-predicted and parity-discriminated devices. Importantly, the integration of single photon detectors into the parity-discriminated device enhances predictive capabilities, mitigates potential failures, and facilitates seamless interaction between the nitrogen-vacancy center and photons, so the two protocols operate in an error-predicted way, improving the experimental feasibility. Additionally, our schemes demonstrate robust fidelities (close to 1) and efficiencies, indicating their feasibility with existing technology.

<title>Abstract</title> We present a comprehensive end-to-end framework for simulating the real-time dynamics of chemical systems on a fault-tolerant quantum computer, incorporating both electronic and nuclear quantum degrees of freedom. An all-particle simulation is nominally efficient on a quantum computer, but practically infeasible. Hence, central to our approach is the construction of a first-quantized plane-wave algorithm making use of pseudoions. The latter consolidate chemically inactive electrons and the nucleus into a single effective dynamical ionic entity, extending the well-established concept of pseudopotentials in quantum chemistry to a two-body interaction. We explicitly describe efficient quantum circuits for initial state preparation across all degrees of freedom, as well as for block-encoding the Hamiltonian describing interacting pseudoions and chemically active electrons, by leveraging recent advances in quantum rejection sampling to optimize the implementations. To extract useful chemical information, we first design molecular fingerprints by combining density-functional calculations with machine learning techniques, and subsequently validate them through surrogate classical molecular dynamics simulations. These fingerprints are then coherently encoded on a quantum computer for efficient molecular identification via amplitude estimation. We provide an extensive analysis of the cost of running the algorithm on a fault-tolerant quantum computer for several chemically interesting systems. As an illustration, simulating the interaction between NH3 and BF3 (a 40-particle system) requires 808 logical qubits to encode the problem, and approximately 10^11 Toffoli gates per femtosecond of time evolution. Our results establish a foundation for further quantum algorithm development targeting chemical and material dynamics.

In a ground breaking discovery in 1994, Shor has shown that quantum computers, if built, can factor numbers efficiently. Since then quantum computing has become a burgeoning field of research, attracting theoreticians and experimentalists alike, and regrouping researchers from fields like computer science, physics, mathematics and engineering. Quantum information is very fragile and prone to decoherence. Yet by the middle of 1996 it has been shown that fault-tolerant quantum computation is possible. We give a simple description of the elements of quantum error-correction and quantum fault-tolerance. After characterizing quantum errors we present several error correction schemes and outline the elements of a full fledged fault-tolerant computation, which works error-free even though all of its components can be faulty. We also mention alternative approaches to error-correction, so called error-avoiding or decoherence-free schemes.

Compiling high-level quantum programs to machines that are size constrained (i.e. limited number of quantum bits) and time constrained (i.e. limited number of quantum operations) is challenging. In this paper, we present SQUARE (Strategic QUantum Ancilla REuse), a compilation infrastructure that tackles allocation and reclamation of scratch qubits (called ancilla) in modular quantum programs. At its core, SQUARE strategically performs uncomputation to create opportunities for qubit reuse. Current Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers and forward-looking Fault-Tolerant (FT) quantum computers have fundamentally different constraints such as data locality, instruction parallelism, and communication overhead. Our heuristic-based ancilla-reuse algorithm balances these considerations and fits computations into resource-constrained NISQ or FT quantum machines, throttling parallelism when necessary. To precisely capture the workload of a program, we propose an improved metric, the "active quantum volume," and use this metric to evaluate the effectiveness of our algorithm. Furthermore, our results show that SQUARE improves the average success rate of NISQ applications by 1.47X. Surprisingly, the additional gates for uncomputation create ancilla with better locality, and result in substantially fewer swap gates and less gate noise overall. SQUARE also achieves an average reduction of 1.5X (and up to 9.6X) in active quantum volume for FT machines.

We propose a protocol to generate a stream of mobile qubits in a graph state through a single stationary parent qubit and discuss two types of its physical implementation, namely, the generation of photonic graph states through an atom-like qubit and those of flying atoms through a cavity-mode photonic qubit. The generated graph states fall into an important class that can hugely reduce the resource requirement of fault-tolerant linear optics quantum computation, which was previously known to be far from realistic. In regard to the flying atoms, we also propose a heralded generation scheme, which allows for high-fidelity graph states even under the photon loss.