Detrimental Decoherence

We propose and discuss two conjectures on the nature of information leaks (decoherence) for quantum computers. These conjectures, if (or when) they hold, are damaging for quantum error-correction as required by fault-tolerant quantum computation. The first conjecture asserts that information leaks for a pair of substantially entangled qubits are themselves substantially positively correlated. The second conjecture asserts that in a noisy quantum computer with highly entangled qubits there will be a strong effect of error synchronization. We present more general conjectures for arbitrary noisy quantum systems.

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