The Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) code is an exciting route to fault-tolerant quantum computing since Gaussian resources and GKP Pauli-eigenstate preparation are sufficient to achieve universal quantum computing. However, there is a disconnect between the noise model that GKP qubits are in theory designed to correct—uniform random displacement errors—and the conditions that affect GKP qubits in superconducting devices in practice: realistic noise channels, logical gates, and inefficient measurements. In this work we bridge this gap in three ways. First, we approximate the effect loss and dephasing on approximate GKP codestates using a random displacement channel, and show that this approximation matches well with numerics. Second, we analyze the error-spreading properties of GKP Clifford gates and describe how a modification in the decoder following the implementation of each gate can reduce the gate infidelity by multiple orders of magnitude. Finally, we consider the effect of homodyne measurement inefficiencies on logical state readout and analyze a scheme to improve the measurement efficiency using the theory of quantum trajectories.
The Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) code is a promising bosonic quantum error-correcting code, encoding logical qubits into a bosonic mode in such a way that many physically relevant noise types can be corrected effectively. A particularly relevant noise channel is the pure loss channel, which the GKP code is known to protect against. In particular, it is commonly pointed out that losses can be corrected by the GKP code by transforming the losses into random Gaussian displacements through a quantum-limited amplification channel. However, implementing such amplification in practice is not ideal and could easily introduce an additional overhead of noise from associated experimental imperfections. Here, we analyze the performance of teleportation-based GKP error correction against loss in the absence of an amplification channel. We show that amplification is not required to perform GKP error correction and that performing amplification actually worsens the performance for practically relevant parameter regimes.
In order to solve practical problems on a quantum computer, it is necessary to use fault-tolerant quantum error correction schemes to overcome noise: the errors arising from imperfections in physical components. The Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) code aims at achieving this in a hardware efficient manner by encoding finite-dimensional logical subspaces in the Hilbert space of one or more continuous variable modes. In near term implementations, however, it is not feasible to eliminate errors entirely, so it is natural to also employ alternative error mitigation techniques together with error correction. In this work, we study a quantum error mitigation method known as probabilistic error cancellation in the context of the GKP code. We compare Steane-type and teleportation-based GKP error correction, and calculate the sampling overheads associated with the technique for square and hexagonal GKP codes. We employ the stabilizer subsystem decomposition for GKP codes to obtain an effective logical channel for noisy operations that is used to express the ideal one of a target logical unitary. We consider noise from finite squeezing on the data and the two ancilla modes, needed for error correction, and examine the relationship between the sampling overhead and the noise for different decoding methods. Our results are calculated for single- and two-qubit GKP Clifford gates and one round of error correction, and show the nontrivial combination of error correction and mitigation in continuous variable codes.
Concatenation of a bosonic code with a qubit code is one of the promising ways to achieve fault-tolerant quantum computation. As one of the most important bosonic codes, the Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) code is proposed to correct small displacement errors in phase space. If the noise in phase space is biased, the square-lattice GKP code can be concatenated with the repetition code that promises a high fault-tolerant threshold to suppress the logical error. In this work, we study the performance of GKP repetition codes with finite-energy ancillary GKP qubits in correcting biased noise. We find that there exists a critical value of noise variance for the ancillary GKP qubit such that the logical Pauli error rate decreases when increasing the code size. Furthermore, one round of GKP error correction has to be performed before concatenating with the repetition code. Our study paves the way for practical implementation of error correction by concatenating the GKP code with low-level qubit codes.
The Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) encoding is a top contender among bosonic codes for fault-tolerant quantum computation. However, analysis of the code is complicated by the fact that finite-energy code states leak out of the ideal GKP code space and are not orthogonal. We analyze a variant of the GKP stabilizer measurement circuit that virtually projects onto the ideal GKP code space between rounds of error correction, even when damped, finite-energy GKP states are used. This allows us to identify logical maps between projectors; however, due to finite-energy effects, these maps fail to resolve completely positive, trace-preserving (CPTP) channels on the logical GKP code space. We present two solutions to this problem based on channel twirling the damping operator. The first uses symmetries of standard binning (SB) decoding to passively twirl over the full stabilizer group. Doing so converts small amounts of damping into stochastic Gaussian random noise (GRN). The second uses active twirling over a minimal set of representative Pauli shifts that keeps the energy in the code finite and allows for arbitrary decoding. This approach is not limited to small damping and allows the study of decoding more general than SB, which can be optimized to the noise in the circuit. Focusing on damping, we compare decoding strategies tailored to different levels of effective squeezing. While our results indicate that SB decoding is suboptimal for finite-energy GKP states, we observe that the advantage of optimized decoding shrinks as the energy in the code increases. Moreover, the performance of both decoding strategies converges to that of the stabilizer-twirled GRN logical channel. These studies provide stronger arguments for two commonplace procedures in the analysis of GKP error correction in the fault-tolerance regime:
(i) using stochastically shifted GKP states in place of coherently damped ones, and
(ii) the use of SB decoding.
The Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) error correcting code uses a bosonic mode to encode a logical qubit, and has the attractive property that its logical Clifford gates can be implemented using Gaussian unitary gates. In contrast, a direct unitary implementation of the
T gate using the cubic phase gate has been shown to have logical error floor unless the GKP codestate has a biased noise profile [1]. In this work, we propose a method for on-demand noise biasing based on a standard GKP error correction circuit. This on-demand biasing circuit can be used to bias the GKP codestate before a
T gate and return it to a non-biased state afterwards. With the on-demand biasing circuit, we prove that the logical error rate of the
T gate can be made arbitrarily small as the quality of the GKP codestates increases. We complement our proof with a numerical investigation of the cubic phase gate subject to a phenomenological noise model, showing that the
T gate can achieve average gate fidelities above
99% with 12 dB of GKP squeezing without the use of postselection. Moreover, we develop a formalism for finding optimal unitary representations of logical diagonal gates in higher levels of the Clifford hierarchy that is based on a framework of ``polynomial phase stabilizers'' whose exponents are polynomial functions of one of the quadrature operators. This formalism naturally extends to multi-qubit logical gates and even to number-phase bosonic codes, providing a powerful algebraic tool for analyzing non-Clifford gates in bosonic quantum codes.
[1] J. Hastrup, M. V. Larsen, J. S. Neergaard-Nielsen, N. C. Menicucci, and U. L. Andersen, Phys. Rev. A 103, 032409 (2021)
Quantifying the accuracy of logical gates is paramount in approximate error correction, where perfect implementations are often unachievable with the available set of physical operations. To this end, we introduce a single scalar quantity we call the (composable) logical gate error. It captures both the deviation of the logical action from the desired target gate as well as leakage out of the code space. It is subadditive under successive application of gates, providing a simple means for analyzing circuits. We show how to bound the composable logical gate error in terms of matrix elements of physical unitaries between (approximate) logical computational basis states. In the continuous-variable context, this sidesteps the need for computing energy-bounded norms. As an example, we study the composable logical gate error for linear optics implementations of Paulis and Cliffords in approximate Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) codes. We find that the logical gate error for implementations of Paulis depends linearly on the squeezing parameter. This implies that their accuracy improves monotonically with the amount of squeezing. For some Cliffords, however, linear optics implementations which are exact for ideal GKP codes fail in the approximate case: they have a constant logical gate error even in the limit of infinite squeezing. This is consistent with previous results about the limitations of certain gate implementations for approximate GKP codes. It shows that findings applicable to ideal GKP codes do not always translate to the realm of physically realizable approximate GKP codes.