Quantum memories based on engineered dissipation

Storing quantum information for long times without disruptions is a major requirement for most quantum information technologies. A very appealing approach is to use self-correcting Hamiltonians, that is tailoring local interactions among the qubits such that when the system is weakly coupled to a cold bath the thermalization process takes a long time. Here we propose an alternative but more powerful approach in which the coupling to a bath is engineered, so that dissipation protects the encoded qubit against more general kinds of errors. We show that the method can be implemented locally in four-dimensional lattice geometries by means of a toric code and propose a simple two-dimensional setup for proof-of-principle experiments.