Fault-tolerant quantum computation with long-range correlated noise

Dorit Aharonov, Alexei Kitaev, John Preskill

Published 2005-10-30Version 1

We prove a new version of the quantum accuracy threshold theorem that applies to non-Markovian noise with algebraically decaying spatial correlations. We consider noise in a quantum computer arising from a perturbation that acts collectively on pairs of qubits and on the environment, and we show that an arbitrarily long quantum computation can be executed with high reliability in D spatial dimensions, if the perturbation is sufficiently weak and decays with the distance r between the qubits faster than 1/r^D.