Quantum computation and quantum-state engineering driven by dissipation

Frank Verstraete, Michael M. Wolf, J. Ignacio Cirac

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

1131 Scopus citations

Abstract

The strongest adversary in quantum information science is decoherence, which arises owing to the coupling of a system with its environment. The induced dissipation tends to destroy and wash out the interesting quantum effects that give rise to the power of quantum computation, cryptography and simulation. Whereas such a statement is true for many forms of dissipation, we show here that dissipation can also have exactly the opposite effect: it can be a fully fledged resource for universal quantum computation without any coherent dynamics needed to complement it. The coupling to the environment drives the system to a steady state where the outcome of the computation is encoded. In a similar vein, we show that dissipation can be used to engineer a large variety of strongly correlated states in steady state, including all stabilizer codes, matrix product states, and their generalization to higher dimensions.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)633-636
Number of pages4
JournalNature Physics
Volume5
Issue number9
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 2009
Externally publishedYes

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