Papers for

quantum error correction engineers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Complexity of finding noise resistant states in quantum systems

On the Complexity of Finding Decoherence Free Subspaces

Abstract: Decoherence free subspaces are a steady-state structure of the open quantum system which preserves quantum coherence between the states lying with in it and thus has found a variety of applications throughout quantum information science and technology. In this paper we study the computational complexity of deciding whether an open quantum system admits a decoherence free subspace or not. More specifically we study this problem with in the context of Markovian open quantum systems, governed by the time-independent Lindblad master equation. Along the way we introduce the $k$-Local Lindbladian problem, which captures the difficulty of computing purity decay rates under Lindbladian dynamics. We show that both problems are hard for the complexity class Quantum Merlin Arthur (QMA) when the locality $k \geq 5$, with the first under perfect completeness and the second being complete for QMA. Our hardness construction generalizes Kitaev's clock Hamiltonian construction to the open quantum system setting by encoding the execution of a quantum circuit into the steady subspace of a Lindbladian containing both pure and mixed history states. This subspace is then mixed depending on the output of the encoded circuit. Our results suggest that deciding whether a generic Markovian open quantum system admits a decoherence free subspace is intractable even for quantum computation.

Tue 22 SeptComputational Complexity
The gist
Some quantum systems have special groups of states that don’t lose their quantum properties easily, called decoherence free subspaces. This paper examines how hard it is to figure out if these groups exist in certain open quantum systems that interact with their environments. The authors show that deciding this is computationally very difficult—even for quantum computers—by linking the problem to a known tough class in quantum computing called QMA. This means that finding these stable quantum states might be practically impossible for complex systems.
Open 2609.26769v1