Entanglement Purification for Quantum Computation

We show that thresholds for fault-tolerant quantum computation are solely determined by the quality of single-system operations if one allows for d-dimensional systems with 8 < or = d < or = 32. Each system serves to store one logical qubit and additional auxiliary dimensions are used to create and purify entanglement between systems. Physical, possibly probabilistic two-system operations with error rates up to 2/3 are still tolerable to realize deterministic high-quality two-qubit gates on the logical qubits. The achievable error rate is of the same order of magnitude as of the single-system operations. We investigate possible implementations of our scheme for several physical setups.