Fault-tolerant quantum processing of physical experiments

Abstract

Quantum computers may reveal features of Nature inaccessible to conventional experiments, but manipulating raw quantum data introduces noise that degrades inference even when the processor is fault-tolerant, creating a data-input bottleneck for robust quantum learning. Here we show that quantum fault tolerance can substantially improve the sample complexity of learning from noisy experiments. We encode unknown quantum states from physical experiments into protected quantum memory, enabling fault-tolerant implementations of quantum learning algorithms otherwise degraded by errors. Using this quantum uploading procedure, we prove that noisy randomized measurement and multi-copy learning tasks can be performed exponentially faster than by any adaptive strategy that does not immediately encode physical states into error-corrected memory. These separations are not simply due to a reduced effective noise rate: they hold even when uploading is substantially noisier than the bare experimental interface, rigorously establishing immediate encoding as the optimal approach to noise-robust learning. We numerically illustrate the speedups in astronomical imaging, where quantum processing of uploaded photons locates an exoplanet obscured by a bright star using orders of magnitude fewer shots than unencoded baselines. Our results establish a robust interface between quantum computers and natural systems, enabling powerful and practical quantum-enhanced experiments.