New Limits on Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computation

We show that quantum circuits cannot be made fault-tolerant against a depolarizing noise level of approximately 45%, thereby improving on a previous bound of 50% (due to Razborov). Our precise quantum circuit model enables perfect gates from the Clifford group (CNOT, Hadamard, S, X, Y, Z) and arbitrary additional one-qubit gates that are subject to that much depolarizing noise. We prove that this set of gates cannot be universal for arbitrary (even classical) computation, from which the upper bound on the noise threshold for fault-tolerant quantum computation follows.