arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Hui Khoon Ng.
We study the robustness of a fault-tolerant quantum computer subject to Gaussian non-Markovian quantum noise, and we show that scalable quantum computation is possible if the noise power spectrum satisfies an appropriate "threshold condition." Our condition is less sensitive to very-high-frequency noise than previously derived threshold conditions for non-Markovian noise.
We introduce the Singapore protocol, a qubit protocol for quantum key distribution that is fully tomographic, more efficient than other tomographic protocols, and very robust. Under ideal circumstances the efficiency is log_2(4/3)=0.415 key bits per qubit sent. This is 25% more than the efficiency of 1/3=0.333 for the standard six-state protocol, which sets the benchmark. We describe a simple two-way communication scheme that extracts 0.4 key bits per qubit and thus gets close to the information-theoretical limit. The noise thresholds that we report for a hierarchy of eavesdropping attacks demonstrate the robustness of the protocol: A secure key can be extracted if there is less than 38.9% noise.
We introduce a general operational characterization of information-preserving structures (IPS) -- encompassing noiseless subsystems, decoherence-free subspaces, pointer bases, and error-correcting codes -- by demonstrating that they are isometric to fixed points of unital quantum processes. Using this, we show that every IPS is a matrix algebra. We further establish a structure theorem for the fixed states and observables of an arbitrary process, which unifies the Schrodinger and Heisenberg pictures, places restrictions on physically allowed kinds of information, and provides an efficient algorithm for finding all noiseless and unitarily noiseless subsystems of the process.
We thoroughly analyse the novel quantum key distribution protocol introduced recently in quant-ph/0412075, which is based on minimal qubit tomography. We examine the efficiency of the protocol for a whole range of noise parameters and present a general analysis of incoherent eavesdropping attacks with arbitrarily many steps in the iterative key generation process. The comparison with the tomographic 6-state protocol shows that our protocol has a higher efficiency (up to 20%) and ensures the security of the established key even for noise parameters far beyond the 6-state protocol's noise threshold.