Noise thresholds for optical quantum computers

Christopher M. Dawson, Henry L. Haselgrove, Michael A. Nielsen

Published 2005-09-09Version 1

In this paper we numerically investigate the fault-tolerant threshold for optical cluster-state quantum computing. We allow both photon loss noise and depolarizing noise (as a general proxy for all local noise), and obtain a threshold region of allowed pairs of values for the two types of noise. Roughly speaking, our results show that scalable optical quantum computing is possible for photon loss probabilities less than 0.003, and for depolarization probabilities less than 0.0001.