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Lev Ioffe
Rutgers University
"The challenge of fault tolerant quantum computation."
Thursday October 11, 2012
4:00pm 203
Refreshments are served at 3:30 p.m. in Physics room 242
I compare the software approach to the error correction in quantum computation to the hardware one in which the protection from errors is due to a proper choice of the microscopic Hamiltonian. I show that from the theoretical point of view the systems protected at the physical level are characterized by the topological order parameter. I argue that neither the software correction nor the topological protection alone can be sufficient to achieve a stable computation. The most promising approach seems to combine some level of hardware error correction that can be achieved in small physical systems characterized by topological order parameter with the software error correction at a higher level. I review the simplest models and discuss their implementation by controllable superconducting circuits that provide this protection.