[QIP-Sem] QIP Seminar Monday: Ben Reichart

[Peter Shor]

Mon 11/6, 4pm in 26-214 (QIP seminar)

Ben Reichardt (Berkeley)
A probabilistic mixing lemma and quantum fault tolerance

The fragile nature of quantum superpositions makes it particularly 
important to design robust schemes for fault-tolerant quantum computation. 
Over the last couple of years, new schemes for achieving fault tolerance 
based on error detection, rather than error correction, appear to tolerate 
as much as 3-6% noise per gate -- an order of magnitude better than 
previous schemes, although with higher overhead. But proof techniques 
could not show that these promising fault-tolerance schemes tolerated any 
noise at all.

With an analysis based on decomposing complicated probability 
distributions into mixtures of simpler ones, we prove the existence of 
constant tolerable noise rates ("noise thresholds") for 
error-detection-based schemes. The talk will survey these recent 
developments and present the probabilistic mixing technique.

Anybody wishing to speak with Ben should contact Peter Shor, 
shor at math.mit.edu.