In
quantum computing
Quantum computing is a type of computation whose operations can harness the phenomena of quantum mechanics, such as superposition, interference, and entanglement. Devices that perform quantum computations are known as quantum computers. Thou ...
, the threshold theorem (or quantum fault-tolerance theorem) states that a quantum computer with a physical error rate below a certain threshold can, through application of
quantum error correction
Quantum error correction (QEC) is used in quantum computing to protect quantum information from errors due to decoherence and other quantum noise. Quantum error correction is theorised as essential to achieve fault tolerant quantum computing tha ...
schemes, suppress the logical error rate to arbitrarily low levels. This shows that quantum computers can be made
fault-tolerant, as an analogue to
von Neumann's threshold theorem for classical computation.
This result was proven (for various error models) by the groups of
Dorit Aharanov and Michael Ben-Or;
Emanuel Knill
Emanuel may refer to:
* Emanuel (name), a given name and surname (see there for a list of people with this name)
* Emanuel School, Australia, Sydney, Australia
* Emanuel School, Battersea, London, England
* Emanuel (band), a five-piece rock ban ...
,
Raymond Laflamme, and
Wojciech Zurek
Wojciech Hubert Zurek ( pl, Żurek; born 1951) is a theoretical physicist and a leading authority on quantum theory, especially decoherence and non-equilibrium dynamics of symmetry breaking and resulting defect generation (known as the Kibble� ...
;
and
Alexei Kitaev
Alexei Yurievich Kitaev (russian: Алексей Юрьевич Китаев; born August 26, 1963) is a Russian–American professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology and permanent member of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical ...
independently.
These results built off a paper of
Peter Shor
Peter Williston Shor (born August 14, 1959) is an American professor of applied mathematics at MIT. He is known for his work on quantum computation, in particular for devising Shor's algorithm, a quantum algorithm for factoring exponentially ...