Towards fault-tolerant quantum computing with trapped ions

Understand

Today ion traps are among the most promising physical systems for constructing a quantum device harnessing the computing power inherent in the laws of quantum physics.

• The standard circuit model of quantum computing requires a universal set of quantum logic gates for the implementation of arbitrary quantum operations.
• As in classical models of computation, quantum error correction techniques enable rectification of small imperfections in gate operations, thus allowing for perfect computation in the presence of noise.
• For fault-tolerant computation, it is commonly believed that error thresholds ranging between 10^-4 and 10^-2 will be required depending on the noise model and the computational overhead for realizing the quantum gates.