Quantum Computing with Two-dimensional Conformal Field Theories

Abstract

Conformal field theories have been extremely useful in our quest to understand physical phenomena in many different branches of physics, starting from condensed matter all the way up to high energy. Here we discuss applications of two-dimensional conformal field theories to fault-tolerant quantum computation based on the coset $ SU(2)_1^{\otimes k} / SU(2)_{k}$. We calculate higher-dimensional braiding matrices by considering conformal blocks involving $2N$ anyons, and search for gapped states that can be built from these conformal blocks. We introduce a gapped wavefunction that generalizes the Moore-Read state which is based on the critical Ising model, and show that our generalization leads to universal quantum computing.