SCHEME FOR REDUCING DECOHERENCE IN QUANTUM COMPUTER MEMORY

Recently, it was realized that use of the properties of quantum mechan ics might speed up certain computations dramatically. Interest has sin ce been growing in the area of quantum computation. One of the main di fficulties of quantum computation is that decoherence destroys the inf ormation in a superposition of states contained in a quantum computer, thus making long computations impossible. It is shown how to reduce t he effects of decoherence for information stored in quantum memory, as suming that the decoherence process acts independently on each of the bits stored in memory. This involves the use of a quantum analog of er ror correcting codes.