CRM Aisenstadt Lecture

Battling decoherence: the fault-tolerant quantum computer

John Preskill

Caltech

Large-scale quantum computers, if and when we succeed in building them, will be able to solve problems that are beyond the reach of ordinary digital computers. But constructing practical quantum computers will be tremendously challenging. A particularly daunting difficulty is that quantum computers are far more susceptible to making errors than conventional digital computers. I will explain the principles of quantum error correction and fault-tolerant quantum computation, which can enable a properly designed quantum computer with imperfect components to achieve good reliability, and I will discuss the status of current research on this topic.