In the context of measurement-based quantum computation a way of maintaining the coherence of a graph state is to measure its stabilizer operators. Aside from performing quantum error correction, it is possible to exploit the information gained from these measurements to characterize and then counteract a coherent source of errors; that is, to determine all the parameters of an error channel that applies a fixed---but unknown---unitary operation to the physical qubits. Such a channel is generated, e.g., by local stray fields that act on the qubits. We study the case in which each qubit of a given graph state may see a different error channel and we focus on channels given by a rotation on the Bloch sphere around either the $\stackrel{\ifmmode \hat{}\else \^{}\fi{}}{\mathbit{x}}$, the $\stackrel{\ifmmode \hat{}\else \^{}\fi{}}{\mathbit{y}}$, or the $\stackrel{\ifmmode \hat{}\else \^{}\fi{}}{\mathbit{z}}$ axis, for which analytical results can be given in a compact form. The possibility of reconstructing the channels at all qubits depends nontrivially on the topology of the graph state. We prove via perturbation methods that the reconstruction process is robust and supplement the analytic results with numerical evidence.
In the context of measurement-based quantum computation a way of maintaining the coherence of a graph state is to measure its stabilizer operators. Aside from performing quantum error correction, it is possible to exploit the information gained from these measurements to characterize and then counteract a coherent source of errors; that is, to determine all the parameters of an error channel that applies a fixed---but unknown---unitary operation to the physical qubits. Such a channel is generated, e.g., by local stray fields that act on the qubits. We study the case in which each qubit of a given graph state may see a different error channel and we focus on channels given by a rotation on the Bloch sphere around either the \mathbitx\ifmmode^\elseˆ\fi, the \mathbity\ifmmode^\elseˆ\fi, or the \mathbitz\ifmmode^\elseˆ\fi axis, for which analytical results can be given in a compact form. The possibility of reconstructing the channels at all qubits depends nontrivially on the topology of the graph state. We prove via perturbation methods that the reconstruction process is robust and supplement the analytic results with numerical evidence.
Stabilizer states form an important class of states in quantum information, and are of central importance in quantum error correction. Here, we provide an algorithm for deciding whether one stabilizer (target) state can be obtained from another stabilizer (source) state by single-qubit Clifford operations (LC), single-qubit Pauli measurements (LPM) and classical communication (CC) between sites holding the individual qubits. What is more, we provide a recipe to obtain the sequence of LC+LPM+CC operations which prepare the desired target state from the source state, and show how these operations can be applied in parallel to reach the target state in constant time. Our algorithm has applications in quantum networks, quantum computing, and can also serve as a design tool—for example, to find transformations between quantum error correcting codes. We provide a software implementation of our algorithm that makes this tool easier to apply. A key insight leading to our algorithm is to show that the problem is equivalent to one in graph theory, which is to decide whether some graph G ′ is a vertex-minor of another graph G . The vertex-minor problem is, in general, -Complete, but can be solved efficiently on graphs which are not too complex. A measure of the complexity of a graph is the rank-width which equals the Schmidt-rank width of a subclass of stabilizer states called graph states, and thus intuitively is a measure of entanglement. Here, we show that the vertex-minor problem can be solved in time O (| G | 3 ), where | G | is the size of the graph G , whenever the rank-width of G and the size of G ′ are bounded. Our algorithm is based on techniques by Courcelle for solving fixed parameter tractable problems, where here the relevant fixed parameter is the rank width. The second half of this paper serves as an accessible but far from exhausting introduction to these concepts, that could be useful for many other problems in quantum information. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘Foundations of quantum mechanics and their impact on contemporary society’.
In this paper we investigate stabilizer quantum error correction codes using controlled phase rotations of strong coherent probe states. We explicitly describe two methods to measure the Pauli operators that generate the stabilizer group of a quantum code. First, we show how to measure a Pauli operator acting on physical qubits using a single coherent state with large average photon number, displacement operations, and photon detection. Second, we show how to measure the stabilizer operators fault-tolerantly by the deterministic preparation of coherent quantum superposition (``cat'') states along with one-bit teleportations between a qubitlike encoding of coherent states and physical qubits.
Graph states are special entangled states advantageous for many quantum technologies, including quantum error correction, multiparty quantum communication, and measurement-based quantum computation. Yet, their fidelity is often disrupted by various errors, most notably qubit loss. In general, given an entangled state, Bell inequalities can be used to certify whether quantum entanglement remains despite errors. Here, we study the robustness of graph states to loss in terms of their Bell violation. Considering the recently proposed linearly scalable Bell operators by Baccari et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 124, 020402 (2020)], we use the stabilizer formalism to derive a formula for the extent by which the Bell violation of a given graph state is decreased with qubit loss. Our analysis allows one to determine which graph topologies are tolerable to qubit loss as well as pinpointing the Achilles' heel of each graph, namely the sets of qubits whose loss jeopardizes the Bell violation. Our results serve as an analytical tool for optimizing experiments and protocols involving graph states in realistically lossy systems. An experimental demonstration of a Bell violation in our noise-tolerant graphs is within reach using state of the art technology.
Coherent noise calls for a reusable physical model, but Pauli twirling erases it and full process tomography scales exponentially. We turn measurement-free quantum error correction into a probe: bit-flip and phase-flip codes polarize few-qubit coherent noise into single-logical-qubit channels, and the resulting fingerprint identifies an 11-parameter three-qubit family. An exact rational-arithmetic rank certificate, evaluated at a rational point in the interior of the parameter domain, proves local injectivity on a dense open subset of that domain. The map is nevertheless not globally injective: a compensating rotation combined with a site exchange yields exact collisions, which we classify and then remove by adding one two-qubit marginal channel. The site exchange is the only nontrivial permutation symmetry of the n-qubit chain generator at any n, so the classification is structural rather than a three-qubit accident. A Cramér--Rao analysis, checked at the level of individual measurement settings, reaches 0.01~rad per parameter at a representative point, and decoder priors rebuilt from such an estimate retain most of their correlation gain. Propagating the generator into a distance-three surface code gives a 14.8-fold encoding gain when the generator is known exactly, and 1.21-fold of the correlation gain survives when the prior is rebuilt from an estimate at the stated precision, closing the loop from characterization to decoding.
Graph states are entangled states that are useful for several quantum information processing tasks, such as measurement-based quantum computation and quantum metrology. As the size of graph states realized in experiments increases, it becomes more essential to devise efficient methods for estimating the fidelity between the ideal graph state and an experimentally realized actual state. Any efficient fidelity-estimation method, in general, must use multiple experimental settings, i.e., needs to switch between at least two measurements. Recently, it has been shown that a single measurement is sufficient if the noise can be modeled as the phase-flip error. Since the bit-flip error should also occur in several experiments, it is desired to extend this simplest method to noise models that include phase and bit-flip errors. However, it seems to be nontrivial because their result strongly depends on properties of the phase-flip error. In this paper, by analyzing effects of the bit-flip error on stabilizer operators of graph states, we achieve the extension to the depolarizing noise, which is a major noise model including phase and bit-flip errors. We also numerically evaluate our simplest method for noise models interpolating between the phase-flip and depolarizing noises.
Abstract Topological quantum error correcting codes have emerged as leading candidates towards the goal of achieving large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computers. However, quantifying entanglement in these systems of large size in the presence of noise is a challenging task. In this paper, we provide two different prescriptions to characterize noisy stabilizer states, including the surface and the color codes, in terms of localizable entanglement over a subset of qubits. In one approach, we exploit appropriately constructed entanglement witness operators to estimate a witness-based lower bound of localizable entanglement, which is directly accessible in experiments. In the other recipe, we use graph states that are local unitary equivalent to the stabilizer state to determine a computable measurement-based lower bound of localizable entanglement. If used experimentally, this translates to a lower bound of localizable entanglement obtained from single-qubit measurements in specific bases to be performed on the qubits outside the subsystem of interest. Towards computing these lower bounds, we discuss in detail the methodology of obtaining a local unitary equivalent graph state from a stabilizer state, which includes a new and scalable geometric recipe as well as an algebraic method that applies to general stabilizer states of arbitrary size. Moreover, as a crucial step of the latter recipe, we develop a scalable graph-transformation algorithm that creates a link between two specific nodes in a graph using a sequence of local complementation operations. We develop open-source Python packages for these transformations, and illustrate the methodology by applying it to a noisy topological color code, and study how the witness and measurement-based lower bounds of localizable entanglement varies with the distance between the chosen qubits.