Scaling of decoherence in wide quantum registers

Abstract

Among the most important parameters for the usefulness of quantum computers are the size of the quantum register and the decoherence time for the quantum information. The decoherence time is expected to get shorter with the number of correlated qubits, but experimental data are only available for small numbers of qubits. Solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance allows one to correlate large numbers of qubits (several hundred) and measure their decoherence rates. We use a modified magnetic dipole-dipole interaction to correlate the proton spins in a solid sample and observe the decay of the resulting highly correlated states. By systematically varying the number of correlated spins, we measure the increase of the decoherence rate with the size of the quantum register.