title: Experimental demonstration of topological error correction.
abstract: Scalable quantum computing can be achieved only if quantum bits are manipulated in a fault-tolerant fashion. Topological error correction--a method that combines topological quantum computation with quantum error correction--has the highest known tolerable error rate for a local architecture. The technique makes use of cluster states with topological properties and requires only nearest-neighbour interactions. Here we report the experimental demonstration of topological error correction with an eight-photon cluster state. We show that a correlation can be protected against a single error on any quantum bit. Also, when all quantum bits are simultaneously subjected to errors with equal probability, the effective error rate can be significantly reduced. Our work demonstrates the viability of topological error correction for fault-tolerant quantum information processing.
authors.affiliation: Shanghai Branch, National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at Microscale and Department of Modern Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Shanghai 201315, China.
authors.forename: Xing-Can
authors.initials: XC
authors.lastname: Yao
authors.forename: Tian-Xiong
authors.initials: TX
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Hao-Ze
authors.initials: HZ
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.forename: Wei-Bo
authors.initials: WB
authors.lastname: Gao
authors.forename: Austin G
authors.initials: AG
authors.lastname: Fowler
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Raussendorf
authors.forename: Zeng-Bing
authors.initials: ZB
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.forename: Nai-Le
authors.initials: NL
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: Chao-Yang
authors.initials: CY
authors.lastname: Lu
authors.forename: You-Jin
authors.initials: YJ
authors.lastname: Deng
authors.forename: Yu-Ao
authors.initials: YA
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.forename: Jian-Wei
authors.initials: JW
authors.lastname: Pan