Ensuring the correct functioning of quantum error correction (QEC) circuits is crucial to achieve fault tolerance in realistic quantum processors subjected to noise.The first checkpoint for a fully operational QEC circuit is to create genuine multipartite entanglement (GME) across all subsystems of physical qubits.We introduce a conditional witnessing technique to certify GME that is efficient in the number of subsystems and, importantly, robust against experimental noise and imperfections.Specifically, we prove that the detection of entanglement in a linear number of bipartitions by a number of measurements that also scales linearly, suffices to certify GME.Moreover, our method goes beyond the standard procedure of separating the state from the convex hull of biseparable states, yielding an improved finesse and robustness compared to previous techniques.We apply our method to the noisy readout of stabilizer operators of the distance-three topological color code and its flag-based fault-tolerant version.In particular, we subject the circuits to combinations of three types of noise, namely, uniform depolarizing noise, two-qubit gate depolarizing noise, and bit-flip measurement noise.We numerically compare our method with the standard, yet generally inefficient, fidelity test and to a pair of efficient witnesses, verifying the increased robustness of our method.Last but not least, we provide the full translation of our analysis to a trapped-ion native gate set that makes it suitable for experimental applications.
Ensuring the correct functioning of quantum error correction (QEC) circuits is crucial to achieve fault tolerance in realistic quantum processors subjected to noise.The first checkpoint for a fully operational QEC circuit is to create genuine multipartite entanglement (GME) across all subsystems of physical qubits.We introduce a conditional witnessing technique to certify GME that is efficient in the number of subsystems and, importantly, robust against experimental noise and imperfections.Specifically, we prove that the detection of entanglement in a linear number of bipartitions by a number of measurements that also scales linearly, suffices to certify GME.Moreover, our method goes beyond the standard procedure of separating the state from the convex hull of biseparable states, yielding an improved finesse and robustness compared to previous techniques.We apply our method to the noisy readout of stabilizer operators of the distance-three topological color code and its flag-based fault-tolerant version.In particular, we subject the circuits to combinations of three types of noise, namely, uniform depolarizing noise, two-qubit gate depolarizing noise, and bit-flip measurement noise.We numerically compare our method with the standard, yet generally inefficient, fidelity test and to a pair of efficient witnesses, verifying the increased robustness of our method.Last but not least, we provide the full translation of our analysis to a trapped-ion native gate set that makes it suitable for experimental applications.
Ensuring the correct functioning of quantum error correction (QEC) circuits is crucial to achieve fault tolerance in realistic quantum processors subjected to noise. The first checkpoint for a fully operational QEC circuit is to create genuine multipartite entanglement across all subsystems of physical qubits. We introduce a conditional witnessing technique to certify genuine multipartite entanglement (GME) that is efficient in the number of subsystems and, importantly, robust against experimental noise and imperfections. Specifically, we prove that the detection of entanglement in a linear number of bipartitions by a number of measurements that also scales linearly, suffices to certify GME. Moreover, our method goes beyond the standard procedure of separating the state from the convex hull of biseparable states, yielding an improved finesse and robustness compared to previous techniques. We apply our method to the noisy readout of stabilizer operators of the distance-three topological color code and its flag-based fault-tolerant version. In particular, we subject the circuits to combinations of three types of noise, namely, uniform depolarizing noise, two-qubit gate depolarizing noise, and bit-flip measurement noise. We numerically compare our method with the standard, yet generally inefficient, fidelity test and to a pair of efficient witnesses, verifying the increased robustness of our method. Last but not least, we provide the full translation of our analysis to a trapped-ion native gate set that makes it suitable for experimental applications.
Many existing genuine multipartite entanglement (GME) witnesses for continuous-variable (CV) quantum systems typically rely on quadrature measurements, which are challenging to implement in platforms where the CV degrees of freedom can be indirectly accessed only through qubit readouts. In this work, we propose methods to implement GME witnesses through phase-space measurements in state-of-the-art experimental platforms, leveraging controlled Gaussian unitaries readily available in qubit-CV architectures. Based on two theoretical results showing that sufficient Wigner negativity can certify GME, we present five concrete implementation schemes using controlled parity, displacement, and beam-splitter operations. Our witnesses can detect paradigmatic GME states like the Dicke and multipartite N00N states, which include the W states as a special case, and GHZ-type entangled cat states. We analyze the performance of these witnesses under realistic noise conditions and finite measurement resolution, showing their robustness to experimental imperfections. Crucially, our implementations require exponentially fewer measurement settings than full tomography, with one scheme requiring only a single measurement on auxiliary modes. The methods are readily applicable to circuit/cavity quantum electrodynamics, circuit quantum acoustodynamics, as well as trapped ions and atomic systems, where such dichotomic phase-space measurements are already routinely performed as native readouts.
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.
Genuine multipartite entanglement represents the strongest type of entanglement, which is an essential resource for quantum information processing. Standard methods to detect genuine multipartite entanglement, e.g., entanglement witnesses, state tomography, or quantum state verification, require full knowledge of the Hilbert space dimension and precise calibration of measurement devices, which are usually difficult to acquire in an experiment. The most radical way to overcome these problems is to detect entanglement solely based on the Bell-like correlations of measurement outcomes collected in the experiment, namely, device independently. However, it is difficult to certify genuine entanglement of practical multipartite states in this way, and even more difficult to quantify it, due to the difficulty in identifying optimal multipartite Bell inequalities and protocols tolerant to state impurity. In this Letter, we explore a general and robust device-independent method that can be applied to various realistic multipartite quantum states in arbitrary finite dimension, while merely relying on bipartite Bell inequalities. Our method allows us both to certify the presence of genuine multipartite entanglement and to quantify it. Several important classes of entangled states are tested with this method, leading to the detection of genuinely entangled states. We also certify genuine multipartite entanglement in weakly entangled Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states, showing that the method applies equally well to less standard states.
Standard procedures for entanglement detection assume that experimenters can exactly implement specific quantum measurements. Here, we depart from such idealizations and investigate, in both theory and experiment, the detection of genuine multipartite entanglement when measurements are subject to small imperfections. For arbitrary qubits number n, we construct multipartite entanglement witnesses where the detrimental influence of the imperfection is independent of n. In a tabletop four-partite photonic experiment, we demonstrate first how a small amount of alignment error can undermine the conclusions drawn from standard entanglement witnesses and then perform the correction analysis. Furthermore, since we consider quantum devices that are trusted but not perfectly controlled, we showcase advantages in terms of noise resilience as compared to device-independent models.
Multipartite entanglement is a key resource for quantum technologies, yet its certification typically relies on correlations from measurements involving all particles, making it increasingly vulnerable to imperfections as the system size grows. Here we report the first experimental demonstration of genuine multipartite entanglement detection from correlations with the minimum possible nontrivial support, known as the entanglement detection length (EDL). Using a photonic platform, we certify W, Dicke, and cluster states with entanglement witnesses constructed from correlations at the EDL. In particular, we verify genuine multipartite entanglement of three- and four-qubit W states and a four-qubit Dicke state using two-body correlations, and of a four-qubit cluster state using three-body correlations. For the four-photon Dicke state, we further show that this minimal-correlation strategy is more robust than the compared global witness under the analyzed local-basis-misalignment model. We also find that, within the witness families considered here, increasing the number of measured subsets enhances the tolerance to noise. These results establish entanglement detection at the EDL limit as a measurement-efficient route to multipartite entanglement certification.