Fault-tolerant quantum computation

It has recently been realized that use of the properties of quantum mechanics might speed up certain computations dramatically. Interest in quantum computation has since been growing. One of the main difficulties in realizing quantum computation is that decoherence tends to destroy the information in a superposition of states in a quantum computer making long computations impossible. A further difficulty is that inaccuracies in quantum state transformations throughout the computation accumulate, rendering long computations unreliable. However, these obstacles may not be as formidable as originally believed. For any quantum computation with t gates, we show how to build a polynomial size quantum circuit that…