Scalable NMR Quantum Computation

Abstract

Nuclear magnetic resonance offers an appealing prospect for implementation of quantum computers, because of the long coherence times associated with nuclear spins, and extensive laboratory experience in manipulating the spins with radio frequency pulses. Existing proposals, however, suffer from a signal-to-noise ratio that decays exponentially in the number of qubits in the quantum computer. This places a severe limit on the size of the computations that can be performed by such a computer; estimates of that limit are well within the range in which a conventional computer taking exponentially more steps would still be practical. We give an NMR implementation in which the signal-to-noise ratio depends only on features of NMR technology, not the size of the computer. This provides a means for NMR computation techniques to scale to sizes at which the exponential speedup enables quantum computation to solve problems beyond the capabilities of classical computers.