A quantitative model for the effective decoherence of a quantum computer with imperfect unitary operations

The problem of the quantitative degradation of the performance of a quantum computer due to noisy unitary gates (imperfect external control) is studied. It is shown that quite general conclusions on the evolution of the fidelity can be reached by using the conjecture that the set of states visited by a quantum algorithm can be replaced by the uniform (Haar) ensemble. These general results are tested numerically against quantum computer simulations of two particular periodically driven quantum systems.