A More Accurate Measurement Model for Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing

Abstract

Aliferis, Gottesman and Preskill [1] reduce a non-Markovian noise model to a local noise model, under assumptions on the smallness of the norm of the system-bath interaction. They also prove constructively that given a local noise model, it is possible to simulate an ideal quantum circuit with size L and depth D up to any accuracy, using circuit constructed out of noisy gates from the Boykin set with size $L' = O(L (log L)^a)$ and depth $D'=O(D (log D)^b)$, where $a$ and $b$ are constants that depend on the error correction code that we choose and the design of the fault-tolerant architecture, in addition to more assumptions [1]. These two results combined give us a fault-tolerant threshold theorem for non-Markovian noise, provided that the strength of the effective local noise model is smaller than a positive number that depends on the fault-tolerant architecture we choose. However the ideal measurement process may involve a strong system-bath interaction which necessarily gives a local noise model of large strength. We refine the reduction of the non-Markovian noise model to the local noise model such that this need not be the case, provided that system-bath interactions from the non-ideal operations is sufficiently small. We make all assumptions that [1] has already made, in addition to a few more assumptions to obtain our result. We also give two specific instances where the norm of the fault gets suppressed by some paramater other than the norm of the system-bath interaction. These include the large ratio of the norm of the ideal Hamiltonian to the norm of the perturbation, and frequency of oscillation of the perturbation. We hence suggest finding specific phenomenological models of noise that exhibit these properties.