added another reference making explicit the expected practical necessity of topological protection:
Jay Sau, A Roadmap for a Scalable Topological Quantum Computer, Physics 10 68 (2017)
small machines are unlikely to uncover truly macroscopic quantum phenomena, which have no classical analogs. This will likely require a scalable approach to quantum computation. […] a roadmap for a scalable architecture based on […] topological quantum computation (TQC) as envisioned by Alexei Kitaev and Michael Freedman […] The central idea of TQC is to encode qubits into states of topological phases of matter. Qubits encoded in such states are expected to be topologically protected, or robust, against the “prying eyes” of the environment, which are believed to be the bane of conventional quantum computation.
added this reference
with this quote:
]]>The qubit systems we have today are a tremendous scientific achievement, but they take us no closer to having a quantum computer that can solve a problem that anybody cares about. What is missing is the breakthrough bypassing quantum error correction by using far-more-stable qubits, in an approach called topological quantum computing.
added some graphics of topological quantum gates as braid group elements.
no real accompanying text yet, maybe later
]]>I know this is a stub entry, but it didn’t even mention the whole point of topological invariance in topological quantum computing. So I have added a half-sentence that cross-links with quantum error correction (which entry remains even more of a stub, of course…)
]]>added pointer to this original article:
added missing publication data to some references, and added this new reference: