Project: Quantum Code Design and Architectures

Acronym	QCDA (Reference Number: QuantERA2017-QCDA)
Duration	01/02/2018 - 31/08/2021
Project Topic	General purpose quantum computers must follow a fault-tolerant design to prevent ubiquitous decoherence processes from corrupting computations. All approaches to fault-tolerance demand extra physical hardware to perform a quantum computation. Kitaev's surface, or toric,code is a popular idea that has captured the hearts and minds of many hardware developers, and has given many people hope that fault-tolerant quantum computation is a realistic prospect. Major industrial hardware developers include Google, IBM, and Intel. They are all currently working toward a fault-tolerant architecture based on the surface code. Unfortunately, however, detailed resource analysis points towards substantial hardware requirements using this approach, possibly millions of qubits for commercial applications. Therefore,improvements to fault-tolerant designs are a pressing near-future issue. This is particularly crucial since sufficient time is required for hardware developers to react and adjust course accordingly. This consortium will initiate a European co-ordinated approach to designing a new generation of codes and protocols for fault-tolerant quantum computation. The ultimate goal is thedevelopment of high-performance architectures for quantum computers that offer significant reductions in hardware requirements; hence accelerating the transition of quantum computing from academia to industry. Key directions developed to achieve these improvements include:the economies of scale offered by large blocks of logical qubits in high-rate codes; and the exploitation of continuous-variable degrees of freedom.The project further aims to build a European community addressing these architectural issues, so that a productive feedback cycle between theory and experiment can continue beyond the lifetime of the project itself. Practical protocols and recipes resulting from this project are anticipated to become part of the standard arsenal for building scalable quantum information processors.
Project Results (after finalisation)
Website	visit project website
Network	QuantERA
Call	QuantERA Call 2017

Project partner

Number	Name	Role	Country
1	University of Sheffield	Coordinator	United Kingdom
2	University College London	Partner	United Kingdom
3	Technical University of Munich	Partner	Germany
4	Centre de Recherche Inria de Paris	Partner	France
5	Delft University of Technology	Partner	Netherlands