Towards a universal set of topologically protected gates for quantum computation with Pfaffian qubits

Abstract

We review the topological quantum computation scheme of Das Sarma et al. from the perspective of the conformal field theory for the two-dimensional critical Ising model. This scheme originally used the monodromy properties of the non-Abelian excitations in the Pfaffian quantum Hall state to construct elementary qubits and execute logical NOT on them. We extend the scheme of Das Sarma et al. by exploiting the explicit braiding transformations for the Pfaffian wave functions containing 4 and 6 quasiholes to implement, for the first time in this context, the single-qubit Hadamard and phase gates and the two-qubit Controlled-NOT gate over Pfaffian qubits in a topologically protected way. In more detail, we explicitly construct the unitary representations of the braid groups B_4, B_6 and B_8 and use the elementary braid matrices to implement one-, two- and three-qubit gates. We also propose to construct a topologically protected Toffoli gate, in terms of a braid-group based Controlled-Controlled-Z gate precursor. Finally we discuss some difficulties arising in the embedding of the Clifford gates and address several important questions about topological quantum computation in general.