Toward fault-tolerant quantum computation without concatenation

Eric Dennis

Published 1999-05-07, updated 2000-07-14Version 2

It has been known that quantum error correction via concatenated codes can be done with exponentially small failure rate if the error rate for physical qubits is below a certain accuracy threshold. Other, unconcatenated codes with their own attractive features-improved accuracy threshold, local operations-have also been studied. By iteratively distilling a certain two-qubit entangled state it is shown how to perform an encoded Toffoli gate, important for universal computation, on CSS codes that are either unconcatenated or, for a range of very large block sizes, singly concatenated.