Roads towards fault-tolerant universal quantum computation

Abstract

Current experiments are taking the first steps toward noise-resilient logical qubits. Crucially, a quantum computer must not merely store information, but also process it. A fault-tolerant computational procedure ensures that errors do not multiply and spread. This review compares the leading proposals for promoting a quantum memory to a quantum processor. We compare magic state distillation, color code techniques and other alternative ideas, paying attention to relative resource demands. We discuss the several no-go results which hold for low-dimensional topological codes and outline the potential rewards of using high-dimensional quantum (LDPC) codes in modular architectures.