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Paper 1

Local Decoders for the 2D and 4D Toric Code

Nikolas P. Breuckmann, Kasper Duivenvoorden, Dominik Michels, Barbara M. Terhal

Year
2016
Journal
arXiv preprint
DOI
arXiv:1609.00510
arXiv
1609.00510

We analyze the performance of decoders for the 2D and 4D toric code which are local by construction. The 2D decoder is a cellular automaton decoder formulated by Harrington which explicitly has a finite speed of communication and computation. For a model of independent $X$ and $Z$ errors and faulty syndrome measurements with identical probability we report a threshold of $0.133\%$ for this Harrington decoder. We implement a decoder for the 4D toric code which is based on a decoder by Hastings arXiv:1312.2546 . Incorporating a method for handling faulty syndromes we estimate a threshold of $1.59\%$ for the same noise model as in the 2D case. We compare the performance of this decoder with a decoder based on a 4D version of Toom's cellular automaton rule as well as the decoding method suggested by Dennis et al. arXiv:quant-ph/0110143 .

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Paper 2

Nonexponential quantum decay under environmental decoherence

M. Beau, J. Kiukas, I. L. Egusquiza, A. del Campo

Year
2017
Journal
arXiv preprint
DOI
arXiv:1706.06943
arXiv
1706.06943

An unstable quantum state generally decays following an exponential law, as environmental decoherence is expected to prevent the decay products from recombining to reconstruct the initial state. Here we show the existence of deviations from exponential decay in open quantum systems under very general conditions. Our results are illustrated with the exact dynamics under quantum Brownian motion and suggest an explanation of recent experimental observations.

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