Abstract Quantum-information processing and computation with bosonic qubits are corruptible by noise channels. Using interferometers and photon-subtraction gadgets (PSGs) accompanied by linear amplification and attenuation, we establish linear-optical methods to mitigate and suppress bosonic noise channels. We first show that by employing amplifying and attenuating PSGs respectively at the input and output of either a thermal or random-displacement channel, probabilistic error cancellation (PEC) can be carried out to mitigate errors in expectation-value estimation. We also derive optimal physical estimators that are properly constrained to improve the sampling accuracy of PEC. Next, we prove that a purely-dephasing channel is coherently suppressible using a multimode Mach–Zehnder interferometer and conditional vacuum measurements (vacuum-based Mach–Zehnder scheme or the VMZ scheme). In the limit of infinitely-many ancillas, with nonvanishing success rates, VMZ using either Hadamard or two-design interferometers turns any dephasing channel into a phase-space-rotated linear-attenuation channel that can subsequently be inverted with (rotated) linear amplification without Kerr nonlinearity. Moreover, for weak central-Gaussian dephasing, the suppression fidelity increases monotonically with the number of ancillas and most optimally with Hadamard interferometers. We demonstrate the performance of these linear-optical mitigation and suppression schemes on common noise channels (and their compositions) and popular bosonic codes. While the theoretical formalism pertains to idling noise channels, we also provide numerical evidence supporting mitigation and suppression capabilities with respect to noise from universal gate operations.
Abstract Quantum-information processing and computation with bosonic qubits are corruptible by noise channels. Using interferometers and photon-subtraction gadgets (PSGs) accompanied by linear amplification and attenuation, we establish linear-optical methods to mitigate and suppress bosonic noise channels. We first show that by employing amplifying and attenuating PSGs respectively at the input and output of either a thermal or random-displacement channel, probabilistic error cancellation (PEC) can be carried out to mitigate errors in expectation-value estimation. We also derive optimal physical estimators that are properly constrained to improve the sampling accuracy of PEC. Next, we prove that a purely-dephasing channel is coherently suppressible using a multimode Mach–Zehnder interferometer and conditional vacuum measurements (vacuum-based Mach–Zehnder scheme or the VMZ scheme). In the limit of infinitely-many ancillas, with nonvanishing success rates, VMZ using either Hadamard or two-design interferometers turns any dephasing channel into a phase-space-rotated linear-attenuation channel that can subsequently be inverted with (rotated) linear amplification without Kerr nonlinearity. Moreover, for weak central-Gaussian dephasing, the suppression fidelity increases monotonically with the number of ancillas and most optimally with Hadamard interferometers. We demonstrate the performance of these linear-optical mitigation and suppression schemes on common noise channels (and their compositions) and popular bosonic codes. While the theoretical formalism pertains to idling noise channels, we also provide numerical evidence supporting mitigation and suppression capabilities with respect to noise from universal gate operations.
Physical-level noise on traveling bosonic modes remains a critical bottleneck for scalable quantum information processing. We show that for any single-mode bosonic code (qumode) corrupted by thermal or Gaussian displacement noise at loss rate μ and amplification G, a hybrid continuous-discrete-variable (CV-DV) interferometer using a single qubit ancilla and two controlled-Fourier (CF) gates sandwiching the noise channel suppresses its effects from linear to quadratic scaling. This is achieved without active error correction or destructive measurements of the encoded state, maintaining high success probabilities ≥0.5 when μG≤0.5. When supplemented with multiple ancillas, the protocol converts photon loss into coherent Fock-damping, and thermal or displacement noise into a mixture of Fock-diagonal noise. The protocol is entirely code-agnostic. For the special case of 2K-fold rotation-symmetric bosonic codes, it simplifies to conventional error detection and projection with K ancillas. Suppression with simple gates and few ancillas demonstrates a clear hardware-efficient advantage over previously proposed ``bypass'' schemes, where quantum information transferred to the DV ancillas is readily corrupted by ancilla noise. Finally, we extend the protocol to a qutrit DV ancilla. This demonstrates resilience to both CV noise and composite DV damping noise, achieving a truly hybrid noise suppression scheme that operates effectively even on CV encodings lacking a well-defined photon-number parity syndrome.
Noise suppression is of paramount importance for reliable quantum information processing and computation. We show that for any single-mode bosonic code (qumode) corrupted by thermal~noise at rate~η and mean \mbox{excitation}~nˉ, a hybrid continuous-discrete-variable~(CV-DV) interferometer using only a single qubit ancilla~(DV) and two controlled~Fourier~(CF) gates sandwiching the noise channel suppresses its effects to O(η2) \emph{without} any active error correction or destructive measurements of the encoded state and with high success probabilities~>0.5 if~η(1+nˉ)<0.5. This suppression scheme works by conditionally monitoring the photon-number parities after the interferometer. Bosonic codes with two logical states of the same photon-number parity (like-parity codes) are \emph{completely resilient} to DV amplitude- and phase-damping ancilla noise. For such codes, the interferometer simplifies to the use of a qumode rotation gate and a \emph{single} CF~gate. This presents a clear advantage of our CF-gate-based error suppression scheme over previously-proposed ``bypass'' protocols, where qubit information transferred to the DV mode is readily corrupted by damping~noise. Finally, we present a simple extension to direct communication of qumode states between two parties over a noisy channel using a preshared DV entangled state, by implementing a CF gate in the first laboratory and its inverse in the other. Such a communication protocol achieves a similar fidelity performance at the same success rate as the single-party case, but with greater resilience to the ancilla noise than DV~teleportation. Resource-efficient multi-qubit codes that depend on a few essential long-range interactions can benefit from it.
Noise present in an environment has significant impacts on a quantum system affecting properties like coherence, entanglement and other metrological features of a quantum state. In this dissertation, we address the effects of different types of noise that are present in a communication channel (or medium) and an interferometric setup, and analyze their effects in the contexts of preserving coherence and entanglement, phase sensitivity, and limits on rate of communication through noisy channels. We first consider quantum optical phase estimation in quantum metrology when phase fluctuations are introduced in the system by its interaction with a noisy environment. By considering path-entangled dual-mode photon Fock states in a Mach-Zehnder optical interferometric configuration, we show that such phase fluctuations affect phase sensitivity and visibility by adding noise to the phase to be estimated. We also demonstrate that the optimal detection strategy for estimating a phase in the presence of such phase noise is provided by the parity detection scheme. We then investigate the random birefringent noise present in an optical fiber affecting the coherence properties of a single photon polarization qubit propagating through it. We show that a simple but effective control technique, called dynamical decoupling, can be used to suppress the effects of the dephasing noise, thereby preserving its ability to carry the encoded quantum information in a long-distance optical fiber communication system. Optical amplifiers and attenuators can also add noise to an entangled quantum system, deteriorating the non-classical properties of the state. We show this by considering a two-mode squeezed vacuum state, which is a Gaussian entangled state, propagating through a noisy medium, and characterizing the loss of entanglement in the covariance matrix and the symplectic formalism for this state. Finally, we discuss limits on the rate of communication in the context of sending messages through noisy optical quantum communication channels. In particular, we prove that a strong converse theorem holds under a maximum photon number constraint for these channels, guaranteeing that the success probability in decoding the message vanishes in the asymptotic limit for the rate exceeding the capacity of the channels.
Virtual distillation is a promising error-mitigation technique that exploits multiple copies of a noisy quantum state to estimate observables as if measured on a purified state. Although originally introduced in the context of bosonic many-body systems under the name of virtual cooling, its development and applications have largely focused on qubit-based quantum computation. Here, we establish a framework for virtual distillation in bosonic quantum information processing and continuous-variable quantum computing. Building on a diagonalization of cyclic shift operators implemented with passive linear-optical interferometers, we derive experimentally accessible protocols for estimating virtually distilled expectation values of observables relevant to bosonic architectures. In particular, we show how to recover noise-mitigated expectation values of number operators, phase-shift operators, and arbitrary quadratures from multi-copy measurements. For number operators, we further demonstrate the estimation of virtually distilled correlators of arbitrary order through the characteristic function of the photon-number distribution. We apply the framework to states affected by photon loss and dephasing, two of the dominant noise mechanisms in bosonic quantum computation, and quantify the resulting suppression of noise contributions. Our results extend virtual distillation beyond its original setting and provide a practical route toward error-mitigated measurements in bosonic quantum processors using experimentally available linear-optical resources.
Real photonic devices are subject to photon losses that can decohere quantum information encoded in the system. In the absence of full fault tolerance, quantum error mitigation techniques have been introduced to help manage errors in noisy quantum devices. In this paper, we introduce an error mitigation protocol inspired by probabilistic error cancellation (a popular error mitigation technique in discrete variable systems) for continuous variable systems. We show that our quantum error cancellation protocol can undo photon losses in expectation value estimation tasks. To do this, we analytically derive the (nonphysical) inverse photon loss channel and decompose it into a sum over physically realizable channels with potentially negative coefficients. The bias of our ideal expectation value estimator can be made arbitrarily small at the cost of increasing the sampling overhead. The protocol requires a noiseless amplification followed by a series of photon subtractions. While these operations can be implemented probabilistically, for certain classes of initial state one can avoid the burden of carrying out the amplification and photon subtractions by leveraging Monte Carlo methods to give an unbiased estimate of the ideal expectation value. We validate our proposed mitigation protocol by simulating the scheme on squeezed vacuum states, cat states, and entangled coherent states. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
Photon loss rates set an effective upper limit on the size of computations that can be run on current linear optical quantum devices. We present a family of techniques designed to mitigate the effects of photon loss on both output probabilities and expectation values derived from noisy linear optical circuits composed of an input of n photons, an m --mode interferometer, and m single photon detectors. Central to these techniques is the construction recycled probabilities . Recycled probabilities are constructed from output statistics affected by loss, and are designed to amplify the signal of the ideal (lossless) probabilities. Classical postprocessing techniques then take recycled probabilities as input and output a set of loss-mitigated probabilities, or expectation values. Our postprocessing methods result in biased estimators of the lossless probabilities. Nevertheless, we provide both analytical and numerical evidence that these methods can be applied, up to large sample sizes, to produce output probabilities with lower combined bias and statistical errors than the statistical errors of the output probabilities obtained from postselection. Therefore, these methods can outperform postselection - currently the standard method of coping with photon loss when sampling from discrete variable linear optical quantum circuits. In contrast, we provide evidence that the popular zero-noise extrapolation technique cannot improve on the performance of postselection for any photon loss rate.