Stabilization of Quantum Information: A Unified Dynamical-Algebraic Approach

The notion of symmetry is shown to be at the heart of all error correction/avoidance strategies for preserving quantum coherence of an open quantum system S e.g., a quantum computer. The existence of a non-trivial group of symmetries of the dynamical algebra of S provides state-space sectors immune to decoherence. Such noiseless sectors, that can be viewed as a noncommutative version of the pointer basis, are shown to support universal quantum computation and to be robust against perturbations. When the required symmetry is not present one can generate it artificially resorting to active symmetrization procedures.