The Fibonacci scheme for fault-tolerant quantum computation

Panos Aliferis, John Preskill

Published 2008-09-30, updated 2008-12-17Version 2

We rigorously analyze Knill's Fibonacci scheme for fault-tolerant quantum computation, which is based on the recursive preparation of Bell states protected by a concatenated error-detecting code. We prove lower bounds on the threshold fault rate of .67\times 10^{-3} for adversarial local stochastic noise, and 1.25\times 10^{-3} for independent depolarizing noise. In contrast to other schemes with comparable proved accuracy thresholds, the Fibonacci scheme has a significantly reduced overhead cost because it uses postselection far more sparingly.