Universal quantum computation with the exchange interaction

Various physical implementations of quantum computers are being investigated, although the requirements1 that must be met to make such devices a reality in the laboratory at present involve capabilities well beyond the state of the art. Recent solid-state approaches have used quantum dots2, donor-atom nuclear spins3 or electron spins4; in these architectures, the basic two-qubit quantum gate is generated by a tunable exchange interaction between spins (a Heisenberg interaction), whereas the one-qubit gates require control over a local magnetic field. Compared to the Heisenberg operation, the one-qubit operations are significantly slower, requiring substantially greater materials and device complexity—potentially contributing to a detrimental increase in the decoherence rate. Here we introduced an explicit scheme in which the Heisenberg interaction alone suffices to implement exactly any quantum computer circuit. This capability comes at a price of a factor of three in additional qubits, and about a factor of ten in additional two-qubit operations. Even at this cost, the ability to eliminate the complexity of one-qubit operations should accelerate progress towards solid-state implementations of quantum computation1.