Noise Thresholds for Optical Quantum Computers

In this Letter we numerically investigate the fault-tolerant threshold for optical cluster-state quantum computing. We allow both photon loss noise and depolarizing noise (as a general proxy for all local noise), and obtain a threshold region of allowed pairs of values for the two types of noise. Roughly speaking, our results show that scalable optical quantum computing is possible for photon loss probabilities $<3\times {10}^{-3}$, and for depolarization probabilities $<{10}^{-4}$.

Figure 1

Threshold region for optical clusters using the 23-qubit Golay code (solid) and 7-qubit Steane code (dashed).