Quantum Error-Correction Explained in a Youthful Way; This Time with Molecules
Again, for the youth in STEM, this piece from Quantum Frontiers blogo-sphere at Caltech may be more agreeable to your method of understanding quantum error-correction. This time with molecules. Check it out at the source, below. Because Quantum is Coming. Qubit.
Quantum Error Correction with Molecules
Selected notes ~
+ In the previous blog post (titled, “On the Coattails of Quantum Supremacy“) we started with Google and ended up with molecules! I also mentioned a recent paper by John Preskill, Jake Covey, and myself (see also this videoed talk) where we assume that, somewhere in the (near?) future, experimentalists will be able to construct quantum superpositions of several orientations of molecules or other rigid bodies. Next, I’d like to cover a few more details on how to construct error-correcting codes for anything from classical bits in your phone to those future quantum computers, molecular or otherwise.
Author’s note [Author at Source, below]: I’d like to acknowledge Jose Gonzalez for helping me immensely with the writing of this post, as well as for drawing the comic panels in the previous post. The figures above were made possible by Mathematica 12.
+ …Now, let’s adapt these ideas to molecules. Consider the rotational states of a dumb-bell molecule consisting of two different atoms. (Let’s assume that we have frozen this molecule to the point that the vibration of the inter-atomic bond is limited, essentially creating a fixed distance between the two atoms.) This molecule can orient itself in any direction, and each such orientation can be represented as a point on the surface of a sphere. Now let us encode a classical bit using the north and south poles of this sphere (represented in the picture below as a black and a white ball, respectively). The north pole of the sphere corresponds to the molecule being parallel to the z-axis, while the south pole corresponds to the molecule being anti-parallel…
+ In closing… Achieving supremacy was a big first step towards making quantum computing a practical and universal tool. However, the largest obstacles still await, namely handling superposition-poisoning noise coming from the ever-curious environment. As quantum technologies advance, other possible routes for error correction are by encoding qubits in harmonic oscillators and molecules, alongside the “traditional” approach of using arrays of physical qubits. Oscillator and molecular qubits possess their own mechanisms for error correction, and could prove useful (granted that the large high-energy space required for the procedures to work can be accessed and controlled). Even though molecular qubits are not yet mature enough to be used in quantum computers, we have at least outlined a blueprint for how some of the required pieces can be built. We are by no means done however: besides an engineering barrier, we need to further develop how to run robust computations on these exotic spaces.
Source: Quantum Frontiers. Victor V. Albert, Quantum Error Correction with Molecules…
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