Quantum Error Correction with bosonic modes

Quantum Error Correction with bosonic modes
Shruti Puri, Yale University
Picture of Shruti Puri
Date and time: Thu, Oct 03, 2019 - 11:30am
Refreshments at 11:15am
Location: Lederle 1033
Category: Condensed Matter Seminar
Abstract:

Realizing useful large-scale quantum computation would require billions of quantum operations or gates on qubits to be performed with ultrahigh degree of accuracy. As a result, active quantum error correction (QEC) is absolutely essential for reliable computation. The key idea behind QEC is that perturbations from the environment are local and hence quantum information is protected by storing or encoding it in non-local degrees of freedom of a high-dimensional system. The system is then periodically monitored for errors and once the error is identified, a correction operation can be applied to undo its effect. Remarkably, it is possible to carry out an arbitrarily accurate computation even with faulty qubits and gates provided the error rate is below some constant threshold. Unfortunately, this tolerance to faults comes at the cost of dauntingly large overheads in the number of qubits and gates. Recently, an alternate hardware efficient approach for QEC, based on encoding a qubit in the large Hilbert space of an oscillator, is gaining momentum. In this talk, I will present an elementary introduction to QEC as well as introduce some of the recent work in the direction of bosonic QEC.