Theoretical and experimental quantum error correction

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Information processing has forever changed the ways we do science, the ways we entertain ourselves, the structure of the economy, and ultimately who we are. The information revolution is the result of our ability to process increasingly larger amounts of information. We have achieved this by continually shrinking the size of transistors, which means more of them can be fit on every microchip. As this shrinking technology moves into to the nano-scale, we are required to look beyond the laws of classical physics and into the realm of quantum mechanics. At present, quantum mechanics poses many challenges to classical computing, but also opens incredible new possibilities. In the past 20 years, physicists and computer scientists have found ways to harness and capitalize on quantum mechanics for computing. The goal of my work is to take advantage of quantum mechanical effects by using them for information processing. We know that quantum devices would be much more powerful than their classical counterparts, and our goal is to make these technologies a reality. There are many challenges to quantum information processing, since such small devices are susceptible to "noise," which disturbs the information and nullifies the quantum advantage. It is therefore critical to the future of this technology to create robust quantum processors. My research will be focused on finding and developing new methods to control and manipulate quantum information in ways that are robust to such disturbance and imperfection. This will be accomplished through the continued development and refinement of quantum error correction. In particular, this proposal will investigate methods of increasing quantum control, characterizing noise of quantum processors, and implementing ways of extracting entropy in qubits due to interaction with noise all in light of implementing quantum error correction. The work will encompass both theoretical and experimental approaches complementing one another. The experimental pieces will include investigations using liquid crystal nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), solid-state NMR, and electron spin resonance (ESR) with goal to implement rounds of quantum error correction.