Towards efficient fault-tolerant quantum computation

The threshold theorem indicates that if errors are all local and their rates are below a certain threshold, it is possible to implement large scale quantum computation with arbitrarily small error based on active quantum error correction (QEC). However, most fault-tolerant quantum computation (FTQC) schemes require enormous overhead to achieve this rate by increasing either the concatenation levels for concatenated codes or the distance (hence the size) for topological codes. As a result, a logical qubit is usually encoded in more than thousands of physical qubits, even when the error rate is below the threshold. In this thesis, we try to reduce the resource overhead of FTQC. We first study a quantum computation scheme using clouds of atoms trapped on atomic chips. It suggests that this scheme is robust to noise to some extent and has potential to be scalable. Secondly, we propose a FTQC scheme of encoding many logical qubits into large code blocks. The error performance of such scheme is numerically studied. Preparation of various ancilla states necessary for computation is also explored. Thirdly, we explore the idea of introducing energy gap to suppress thermal noise on each qubit. We show that fault-tolerant holonomic quantum computation (HQC) can be implemented in stabilizer codes with the existence of such energy protection. Especially, we studied fault-tolerant HQC in surface codes in detail. This scheme opens the possibility for self-correcting quantum computation in 2D lattice.