Any form of manipulation of quantum information, be it storage or transfer, may be represented as a quantum transmission channel, i.e. a map transforming the input state of the sender into the receiver's output state. Given the extreme sensitivity of quantum information to noise, it is crucial to study the impact of incoherent effects on quantum information processing and communication if technological applications are to become a reality. The goal of the project is to develop a general framework for understanding and management of noise effects in quantum information technologies, with particular attention paid to the previously unexplored area of correlated noise errors that commonly arise in space and/or time, especially in large scale operations. The project reaches beyond current restricted models that either involve statistically independent errors, or possess a high degree of symmetry (as those involved in the identification of decoherence-free subspaces), and often are inapplicable to real physical systems.

This project will address a variety of problems ranging from general channel properties (ultimate bounds on capacities, quantification of correlation effects and identification of important classes of channels), through encoding and decoding methods (optimization of attainable capacities in small- and largescale regimes, all-inclusive analysis of required resources, universal coding for partly known channels) and quantum estimation of correlated noise (efficiency of estimation procedures, extraction of crucial parameters), to environments with memory (simulation techniques, effective channel models, probing environment properties). The final results of the project, obtained through a concerted theoretical and experimental effort, should pave the way for implementing quantum information processing and communication in realistic physical platforms. The consortium consists of experimentalists, applied theorists and mathematical physicists and these will collaborate closely to benefit from each others expertise in these often complementary areas.


Work package 1: General channel properties
Work package 2: Channel utilization: encoding and decoding
Work package 3: Characterizing correlated noise channels by quantum process estimation
Work package 4: Few qubit dynamics in realistic environments
Work package 5: Management and dissemination

The objective of the project is to develop a general framework for the understanding and management of noise effects in quantum information technologies.

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