Experimentalists are getting better and better at building qubits, but no matter how hard they try, their qubits will never be perfect. In order to build a large quantum computer, we will almost certainly need to encode the qubits using quantum error-correcting codes and encode the quantum circuits using fault-tolerant protocols. This will eventually allow reliable quantum computation even when the individual components are imperfect. I will review the current state of the art of quantum fault tolerance and discuss progress towards answering the most important questions that will enable large fault-tolerant quantum computers.
Daniel Gottesman is a faculty member at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario. He is also a Senior Scientist with the company Quantum Benchmark. He received his Ph.D. at Caltech in 1997, and did postdocs at Los Alamos National Lab and Microsoft Research, after which he served in the UC Berkeley CS department as a Long-Term CMI Prize Fellow with the Clay Mathematics Institute.
Most of his work is in the field of quantum computation and quantum information. He has worked in a number of subfields, particularly quantum error correction, fault-tolerant
He was named to MIT Technology Review's TR100: Top Young Innovators for 2003. He is also a Fellow of the American Physical Society.