Manipulating quantum information with spin torque

The use of spin torque as a substitute for magnetic fields is now well established for classical operations like the switching of a nanomagnet. What we are describing here could be viewed as an application of spin torque like effects to quantum processes involving single qubit rotations as well as two qubit entanglement. A key ingredient of this scheme is the use of a large number of itinerant electrons whose cumulative effect is to produce the desired qubit operations on static spins. Each interaction involves entanglement and collapse of wavefunctions so that the operation is only approximately unitary. However, we show that the non-unitary component of the operations can be kept below tolerable limits with proper design. As a capstone example, we present the implementation of a complete CNOT gate using the proposed spin potential based architecture, and show that the fidelity under ideal conditions can be made acceptably close to one.