Principal Investigator Isaac Chuang
Quantum systems with finite coherence times can be used to perform arbitrarily long and difficult quantum computations if the decoherence rate is less than some constant threshold. Understanding the extent to which the accuracy threshold can be increased under physically realistic assumptions is one of the great open problems in the theory of quantum computation. We are interested in (1) the influence of geometry on the accuracy threshold and (2) the behavior of the accuracy threshold for engineered systems, where constant and linear factors matter.