A computational quest for quantum codes

Gregory Crosswhite, University of Washington

Photo of Gregory Crosswhite

In the field of quantum computing there is a grand battle between the forces of mankind, which seek to reliably store and manipulate quantum information – the information inside of a quantum computer – and the forces of nature, which generally seek to destroy it. Armies of theorists have fought to find mathematical shelters from the storm – known as “quantum codes” – in which quantum information can be protected, but too often there has been a wide gap between the theoretical constructions that they can envision and the practical systems that can actually be built by our brigades of experimentalists.

Our group has taken an approach to fighting this battle that employs a different tactic: rather than starting from the ideal and working towards the possible, we start from the very beginning with realistic models of systems that experimentalists might build, and then perform systematic searches through the space of such models in a “computational quest“ to see which contain natural shelters for quantum information. In this poster we present the broad ideas behind our computational strategy and some of the results that we have obtained.

Abstract Author(s): Gregory Crosswhite