Supervisors: 

Dr Simon Benjamin

Prof Terry Rudolph

Distributed Quantum Computing

 Building a working quantum computer is a huge experimental challenge, and one of the major problems faced is that of scalability. Small numbers of qubits can be well controlled but increasing this to bigger numbers becomes very difficult.

One way of reducing these problems is by using a distributed system. Here the quantum computer is composed of a number of nodes each containing only a few qubits. Each node is a like a small quantum computer which can do good operations. But between nodes only very noisy operations are possible.

My project looks at how a system like this can be used to carry out quantum computation, and how it's possible to protect this computation from errors.

Publications

Naomi H. Nickerson, Ying Li, Simon C. Benjamin - Topological quantum computing with a very noisy network and local error rates approaching one percent. Nature Communications 4:1756 doi: 10.1038/ncomms2773, April 2013

Naomi H. Nickerson, Joseph F. Fitzimons and Simon C. Benjamin. Freely scalable quantum technologies using cells of 5-to-50 qubits with very lossy and noisy photonic links. arXiv:1406.0880[quant-ph]

Joe O'Gorman, Naomi H. Nickerson, Philipp Ross, John J. L. Morton and Simon C. Benjamin. A silicon-based surface code quantum computer. arXiv:1406.5149 [quant-ph]