Powerpoint of my talk at last week’s QIP Workshop. I’d post pdf as well, but Acrobat seems to be on holiday.
The talk is about a model of quantum computation known as the one-way quantum computer, or cluster-state quantum computer.
The talk reports joint work with Chris Dawson and Henry Haselgrove.
Here’s a slightly modified version of the abstract.
In the one-way quantum computer a quantum computation is performed by first preparing a special entangled state (the cluster state), and then performing a sequence of adaptive single-qubit measurements on that state. It’s thus a radical departure from the standard way of thinking about quantum computers, which is in terms of quantum circuits.
The talk begins with a review of the cluster-state model, following Raussendorf and Briegel.
The talk describes two new contributions. First, I explain a simple argument for why in some physical systems (particularly optics) it may be much easier to build a one-way quantum computer than it is to build a conventional circuit-based quantm computer.
I should say, by the way, that Yoran and Reznik have independently pursued some related ideas.
In the second part of the talk I discuss how to make the one-way quantum computer fault-tolerant, i.e., noise-resistant. I explain why the fault-tolerance is not obvious from standard thresholds for quantum circuits, and how to adapt the threshold proof to the one-way quantum computer.