arXiv subjects

Dorit Aharonov

Publications and source records attributed to Dorit Aharonov.

58 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv1998

Quantum Computation

In the last few years, theoretical study of quantum systems serving as computational devices has achieved tremendous progress. We now have strong theoretical evidence that quantum computers, if built, might be used as a dramatically powerful computational tool. This review is about to tell the story of theoretical quantum computation. I left out the developing topic of experimental realizations of the model, and neglected other closely related topics which are quantum information and quantum communication. As a result of narrowing the scope of this paper, I hope it has gained the benefit of being an almost self contained introduction to the exciting field of quantum computation. The review begins with background on theoretical computer science, Turing machines and Boolean circuits. In light of these models, I define quantum computers, and discuss the issue of universal quantum gates. Quantum algorithms, including Shor's factorization algorithm and Grover's algorithm for searching databases, are explained. I will devote much attention to understanding what the origins of the quantum computational power are, and what the limits of this power are. Finally, I describe the recent theoretical results which show that quantum computers maintain their complexity power even in the presence of noise, inaccuracies and finite precision. I tried to put all results in their context, asking what the implications to other issues in computer science and physics are. In the end of this review I make these connections explicit, discussing the possible implications of quantum computation on fundamental physical questions, such as the transition from quantum to classical physics.

quant-ph↗

arXiv1998

Quantum Circuits with Mixed States

We define the model of quantum circuits with density matrices, where non-unitary gates are allowed. Measurements in the middle of the computation, noise and decoherence are implemented in a natural way in this model, which is shown to be equivalent in computational power to standard quantum circuits. The main result in this paper is a solution for the subroutine problem: The general function that a quantum circuit outputs is a probabilistic function, but using pure state language, such a function can not be used as a black box in other computations. We give a natural definition of using general subroutines, and analyze their computational power. We suggest convenient metrics for quantum computing with mixed states. For density matrices we analyze the so called ``trace metric'', and using this metric, we define and discuss the ``diamond metric'' on superoperators. These metrics enable a formal discussion of errors in the computation. Using a ``causality'' lemma for density matrices, we also prove a simple lower bound for probabilistic functions.

quant-ph↗

arXiv1996

Polynomial Simulations of Decohered Quantum Computers

We define formally decohered quantum computers (using density matrices), and present a simulation of them by a probabalistic classical Turing Machine. We study the slowdown of the simulation for two cases: (1) sequential quantum computers, or quantum Turing machines(QTM), and (2) parallel quantum computers, or quantum circuits. This paper shows that the computational power of decohered quantum computers depends strongly on the amount of parallelism in the computation. The expected slowdown of the simulation of a QTM is polynomial in time and space of the quantum computation, for any non zero decoherence rate. This means that a QTM subjected to any amount of noise is worthless. For decohered quantum circuits, the situation is more subtle and depends on the decoherence rate, eta. We find that our simulation is efficient for circuits with decoherence rate higher than some constant, but exponential for general circuits with decoherence rate lower than some other constant. Using computer experiments, we show that the transition from exponential cost to polynomial cost happens in a short range of decoherence rates, and exhibit the phase transitions in various quantum circuits.

quant-ph↗

arXiv1996

Fault Tolerant Quantum Computation with Constant Error

Recently Shor showed how to perform fault tolerant quantum computation when the error probability is logarithmically small. We improve this bound and describe fault tolerant quantum computation when the error probability is smaller than some constant threshold. The cost is polylogarithmic in time and space, and no measurements are used during the quantum computation. The result holds also for quantum circuits which operate on nearest neighbors only. To achieve this noise resistance, we use concatenated quantum error correcting codes. The scheme presented is general, and works with all quantum codes that satisfy some restrictions, namely that the code is ``proper''. We present two explicit classes of proper quantum codes. The first example of proper quantum codes generalizes classical secret sharing with polynomials. The second uses a known class of quantum codes and converts it to a proper code. This class is defined over a field with p elements, so the elementary quantum particle is not a qubit but a ``qupit''. With our codes, the threshold is about 10^(-6). Hopefully, this paper motivates a search for proper quantum codes with higher thresholds, at which point quantum computation becomes practical.

quant-ph↗