Towards fault-tolerant quantum computation with universal continuous-variable gates
Abstract
Continuous-variable (CV) systems have shown remarkable potential for quantum computation, particularly excelling in scalability and error correction through bosonic encoding. Within this framework, the foundational notion of computational universality was introduced in [Phys. Rev. Lett. 82, 1784 (1999)], and has proven especially successful since it allows for the identification of finite sets of universal CV gates independent of the encoding scheme. However, achieving the critical objective of fault-tolerant computation requires some form of encoding, and to date there has been no proof that these universal CV gates can lead to encoded fault tolerance. We present compelling evidence in this direction by utilizing the Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) encoding. Specifically, we numerically optimize the generation of GKP states from vacua using circuits comprised solely of universal CV gates. We demonstrate that these states can be attained with sufficient quality to exhibit error probabilities lower than the threshold needed to achieve a fault-tolerant memory via concatenated GKP-stabilizer codes.
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BibTeX
@misc{blair2026towards,
title = {{Towards fault-tolerant quantum computation with universal continuous-variable gates}},
author = {Sheron Blair and Francesco Arzani and Giulia Ferrini and Alessandro Ferraro},
howpublished = {HAL},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2506.13643},
eprint = {2506.13643},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://hal.science/hal-05732609v1},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Towards fault-tolerant quantum computation with universal continuous-variable gates
AU - Sheron Blair
AU - Francesco Arzani
AU - Giulia Ferrini
AU - Alessandro Ferraro
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/01
PB - HAL
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2506.13643
UR - https://hal.science/hal-05732609v1
AB - Continuous-variable (CV) systems have shown remarkable potential for quantum computation, particularly excelling in scalability and error correction through bosonic encoding. Within this framework, the foundational notion of computational universality was introduced in [Phys. Rev. Lett. 82, 1784 (1999)], and has proven especially successful since it allows for the identification of finite sets of universal CV gates independent of the encoding scheme. However, achieving the critical objective of fault-tolerant computation requires some form of encoding, and to date there has been no proof that these universal CV gates can lead to encoded fault tolerance. We present compelling evidence in this direction by utilizing the Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) encoding. Specifically, we numerically optimize the generation of GKP states from vacua using circuits comprised solely of universal CV gates. We demonstrate that these states can be attained with sufficient quality to exhibit error probabilities lower than the threshold needed to achieve a fault-tolerant memory via concatenated GKP-stabilizer codes.
ER -