Decoherence-free subspaces for multiple-qubit errors. II. Universal, fault-tolerant quantum computation

Decoherence-free subspaces (DFSs) shield quantum information from errors induced by the interaction with an uncontrollable environment. Here we study a model of correlated errors forming an Abelian subgroup (stabilizer) of the Pauli group (the group of tensor products of Pauli matrices). Unlike previous studies of DFSs, this type of error does not involve any spatial symmetry assumptions on the system-environment interaction. We solve the problem of universal, fault-tolerant quantum computation on the associated class of DFSs. We do so by introducing a hybrid DFS quantum error-correcting-code approach, where errors that arise due to departure of the codewords from the DFS are corrected actively.