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.
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.
Computing localizable entanglement for noisy many-particle quantum states is difficult due to the optimization over all possible sets of local projection measurements. Therefore, it is crucial to develop lower bounds, which can provide useful information about the behaviour of localizable entanglement, and which can be determined by measuring a limited number of operators, or by performing the least number of measurements on the state, preferably without performing a full state tomography. In this paper, we adopt two different yet related approaches to obtain a witness-based, and a measurement-based lower bounds for localizable entanglement. The former is determined by the minimal amount of entanglement that can be present in a subsystem of the multipartite quantum state, which is consistent with the expectation value of an entanglement witness. Determining this bound does not require any information about the state beyond the expectation value of the witness operator, which renders this approach highly practical in experiments. The latter bound of localizable entanglement is computed by restricting the local projection measurements over the qubits outside the subsystem of interest to a suitably chosen basis. We discuss the behaviour of both lower bounds against local physical noise on the qubits, and discuss their dependence on noise strength and system size. We also analytically determine the measurement-based lower bound in the case of graph states under local uncorrelated Pauli noise.
Characterizing large noisy multiparty quantum states using genuine multipartite entanglement is a challenging task. In this paper, we calculate lower bounds of genuine multipartite entanglement localized over a chosen multiparty subsystem of multiqubit stabilizer states in the noiseless and noisy scenarios. In the absence of noise, adopting a graph-based technique, we perform the calculation for arbitrary graph states as representatives of the stabilizer states and show that the graph operations required for the calculation have a polynomial scaling with the system size. As demonstrations, we compute the localized genuine multipartite entanglement over subsystems of large graphs having linear, ladder, and square structures. We also extend the calculation for graph states subjected to single-qubit Markovian or non-Markovian Pauli noise on all qubits and demonstrate, for a specific lower bound of the localizable genuine multipartite entanglement corresponding to a specific Pauli measurement setup, the existence of a critical noise strength beyond which all of the postmeasured states are biseparable. The calculation is also useful for arbitrary large stabilizer states under noise due to the local unitary connection between stabilizer states and graph states. We demonstrate this by considering a toric code defined on a square lattice and computing a lower bound of localizable genuine multipartite entanglement over a nontrivial loop of the code. Similar to the graph states, we show the existence of the critical noise strength in this case also and discuss its interesting features.
We investigate the static and the dynamical behavior of localizable entanglement and its lower bounds on nontrivial loops of topological quantum codes with parallel magnetic field. Exploiting the connection between the stabilizer states and graph states in the absence of the parallel field and external noise, we identify a specific measurement basis, referred to as the canonical measurement basis, that optimizes localizable entanglement when measurement is restricted to single-qubit Pauli measurements only, thereby providing a lower bound. In situations where computing even the lower bound is difficult, we propose an approximation of the lower bound that can be computed for larger systems according to the computational resource in hand. Additionally, we compute a lower bound of the localizable entanglement that can be computed by determining the expectation value of an appropriately designed witness operator. We investigate the behavior of these lower bounds in the vicinity of the topological to nontopological quantum phase transition of the system, and perform a finite-size scaling analysis. We also investigate the dynamical features of these lower bounds when the system is subjected to Markovian or non-Markovian single-qubit dephasing noise. We find that in the case of the non-Markovian dephasing noise, at large time, the canonical measurement-based lower bound oscillates with a larger amplitude when the initial state of the system undergoing dephasing dynamics is chosen from the nontopological phase, compared to the same for an initial state from the topological phase. On the other hand, repetitive collapses followed by revivals to high value with time are observed for the proposed witness-based lower bound in the nontopological phase, which is absent in the topological phase. These features can be utilized to distinguish the topological phase of the system from the nontopological phase in the presence of dephasing noise.
Entanglement is a central concept in quantum information and a key resource for many quantum protocols. In this work we propose and analyze a class of entanglement witnesses that detect the presence of entanglement in subsystems of experimental multiqubit stabilizer states. The witnesses we propose can be decomposed into sums of Pauli operators and can be efficiently evaluated by either two measurement settings only or at most a number of measurements that only depends on the size of the subsystem of interest. We provide two constructive methods to design the local witness operators, the first one based on the local unitary equivalence between graph and stabilizer states, and the second one based on sufficient and necessary conditions that the respective set of constituent Pauli operators needs to fulfill. We theoretically establish the noise tolerance of the proposed witnesses and benchmark their practical performance by analyzing the local entanglement structure of an experimental seven-qubit quantum error correction code.
In fault-tolerant quantum computation [1], quantum information is protected from noise by encoding it in somewhat non-local degrees of freedom, thus distributing it among many smaller subsystems, typically qubits. This makes sense under the physically relevant assumption that interactions with the environment have a local nature. The implementation of gates, consequently, must be also as local as possible to preserve the structure of noise. This is naturally achieved with transversal gates, i.e. unitary operators that transform encoded states by acting separately on suitable subsystems, in the simplest case independently on each qubit. Unfortunately, no code admits a universal transversal set of gates [2]. Topological quantum error correcting codes [3] introduce a richer notion of locality by considering the spatial location of the physical qubits, which are assumed to be arranged on a lattice. They come in families parametrized with a lattice size, for a fixed spatial dimension. Their defining features are (i) that the measurements needed to recover information about errors only involve a few neighbouring qubits and (ii) that no encoded information can be recovered without access to a number of physical qubits comparable to the system size. Rather than sticking to the above definition of transversality, for topological codes it is natural to consider instead quantum circuits of fixed depth with geometrically local gates [4, 5]. Remarkably, it has been recently shown that spatial dimension imposes constraints on the transversal gates that are allowed [5]. In particular, this is true in the case of topological stabilizer codes, where it has been found that transversal gates on D-dimensional codes have to belong to certain sets PD. A first main result of this work [6] is that codes that saturate these bounds can be constructed for every D, in the sense that they admit at least a transversal gate in PD (not belonging to PD−1). In particular, the result applies to color codes [7, 8, 9, 10], where the single-qubit gate RD := ( 1 0 0 e2πi/2 D ) is transversal (in the more strict non-topological sense).
Quantum information processing has practical applications like exponential speed ups in optimisation problems or the simulation of complex quantum systems. However, well controlled quantum systems realised experimentally to process the information are sensitive to noise. The progress in leading experimental platforms like superconducting qubits or trapped ions has al-lowed the realisation of high-fidelity quantum processors known as Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices with roughly 50 qubits. NISQ devices are meant to be large enough to show, despite their imperfections, an advantage over classical processors in some computational tasks and pro-vide a rich playground to prove principles for future quantum algorithms and protocols. However, quantum processors need to be scaled up to imple-ment quantum algorithms that are relevant for practical applications. For this purpose, Quantum Error Correction (QEC) codes, which encode the information in multi-partite quantum states that are generally highly en-tangled, become crucial to eliminate the errors introduced by noise sources like qubit loss. Here we introduce a protocol to correct qubit loss, i.e., the impossibility to access the information encoded in a qubit, in the color code, a leading candidate for fault-tolerant quantum computation. We show that the achieved tolerance of 46(1)% to qubit loss is related to a novel percola-tion problem on three coupled lattices. Our work shows the high robustness of the color under our protocol and has practical importance for implemen-tations of fault-tolerant QEC. In our second line of research we propose and analyse local entanglement witnesses as efficient and platform-agnostic detectors of the entanglement between qubit subsystems, providing a de-scription of the entanglement structure in, in principle, arbitrarily large quantum systems. Since entanglement is a genuinely quantum property used as a resource in most quantum algorithms, local witnesses, which can be implemented with current technology, are of interest for current and future quantum processors.