Encoded Universality in Physical Implementations of a Quantum Computer

We revisit the question of universality in quantum computing and propose a new paradigm. Instead of forcing a physical system to enact a predetermined set of universal gates (e.g., single-qubit operations and CNOT), we focus on the intrinsic ability of a system to act as a universal quantum computer using only its naturally available interactions. A key element of this approach is the realization that the fungible nature of quantum information allows for universal manipulations using quantum information encoded in a subspace of the full system Hilbert space, as an alternative to using physical qubits directly. Starting with the interactions intrinsic to the physical system, we show how to determine the possible universality resulting from these interactions over an encoded subspace. We outline a general Lie-algebraic framework which can be used to find the encoding for universality and give several examples relevant to solid-state quantum computing.