Scheme for reducing decoherence in quantum computer memory

Recently, it was realized that use of the properties of quantum mechanics might speed up certain computations dramatically. Interest has since been growing in the area of quantum computation. One of the main difficulties of quantum computation is that decoherence destroys the information in a superposition of states contained in a quantum computer, thus making long computations impossible. It is shown how to reduce the effects of decoherence for information stored in quantum memory, assuming that the decoherence process acts independently on each of the bits stored in memory. This involves the use of a quantum analog of errorcorrecting codes.