Encoding a qubit in the continuous degrees of freedom of a quantum system, such as bosonic modes, is a powerful alternative to modern quantum error correction (QEC). Among the most prominent bosonic QEC codes, binomial codes provide protection against loss and dephasing errors by encoding logical states in finite superpositions of Fock states with binomially weighted coefficients. While much attention has been given to their error-correcting capabilities and integration into fault-tolerant architectures, efficient methods for generating arbitrary binomial codewords remain scarce. In this work, we propose a scheme for generating these codewords by exploiting nonlinear multiphoton interactions between a continuous-variable bosonic mode (oscillator) and a two-level system (spin/qubit). Our proposed scheme assumes the ability to prepare the oscillator in an arbitrary Fock state and the qubit in an arbitrary superposition of its basis states and access to arbitrarily high multiphoton interactions. To enhance the experimental feasibility of our scheme, we further demonstrate how to reduce the required order parameter of multiphoton interactions by a factor of two for a special class of code states.
Encoding a qubit in the continuous degrees of freedom of a quantum system, such as bosonic modes, is a powerful alternative to modern quantum error correction (QEC). Among the most prominent bosonic QEC codes, binomial codes provide protection against loss and dephasing errors by encoding logical states in finite superpositions of Fock states with binomially weighted coefficients. While much attention has been given to their error-correcting capabilities and integration into fault-tolerant architectures, efficient methods for generating arbitrary binomial codewords remain scarce. In this work, we propose a scheme for generating these codewords by exploiting nonlinear multiphoton interactions between a continuous-variable bosonic mode (oscillator) and a two-level system (spin/qubit). Our proposed scheme assumes the ability to prepare the oscillator in an arbitrary Fock state and the qubit in an arbitrary superposition of its basis states and access to arbitrarily high multiphoton interactions. To enhance the experimental feasibility of our scheme, we further demonstrate how to reduce the required order parameter of multiphoton interactions by a factor of two for a special class of code states.
We study the problem of n -fold rotationally symmetric bosonic state preparation, which is of great importance to bosonic quantum error correction, using a multiphoton interaction between an oscillator and an auxiliary qubit. We present an n -photon Law-Eberly ( n LE) protocol that serves as an analytic baseline, alongside numerical optimal control calculations that further reduce state preparation time. We find that multiphoton control protocols substantially reduce preparation times for binomial, cat, and Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill codewords compared to schemes relying on standard linear interactions. Further, we achieve arbitrary control over the oscillator's Hilbert space by combining different multiphoton interaction orders. We also extend these control improvements to the preparation of rotationally symmetric multi-oscillator states. Lastly, numerical simulations using realistic planar superconducting circuit parameters validate the robustness of our scheme against qubit and oscillator decoherence. Our findings can significantly enhance the performance of bosonic codes on planar superconducting hardware, an important ingredient for scalable fault-tolerant quantum computers.
Bosonic codes, leveraging infinite-dimensional Hilbert spaces for redundancy, offer great potential for encoding quantum information. However, a practical continuous-variable bosonic code that can simultaneously correct both photon loss and dephasing errors, while achieving a high level of compliance with the Knill-Laflamme conditions within an experimentally friendly structure, remains elusive. Here, we propose a code based on the superposition of squeezed Fock states with an error-correcting capability that scales as ∝exp(-7r), where r is the squeezing level. The codewords remain orthogonal at all squeezing levels. In particular, this code achieves high-precision error correction for both single-photon loss and dephasing, even at moderate squeezing levels. Building on this code, we develop quantum error correction schemes that exceed the breakeven point, supported by analytical derivations of all necessary quantum gates. Our code offers a competitive alternative to previous encodings for quantum computation using continuous bosonic qubits.
Quantum error correction (QEC) is indispensable for scalable quantum computing, but implementing it with minimal hardware overhead remains a central challenge. Large spin systems with collective degrees of freedom offer a promising route to reducing the control complexity of qubit architectures while retaining a large Hilbert space for fault-tolerant encoding. However, existing proposals for logical gates and QEC in spin ensembles generally rely on inefficient higher-order interactions. Here we introduce spin-N-Cat codes, which encode logical qubits in superpositions of spin-coherent states and generalize bosonic Cat codes to the modular subspaces of permutationally symmetric spin ensembles. The code corrects collective and individual dephasing, excitation, and decay errors. We also present an efficient physical realization in central-spin systems, such as a quantum dot, where encoding, decoding, and a universal, fault-tolerant, and bias-preserving gate set are implemented using only first-order interactions. Numerical simulations demonstrate high logical fidelity under dephasing and excitation-decay noise, independent of noise bias, and that full QEC cycles are feasible with realistic microscopic parameters. For the large collective spins available in quantum dots, this translates into a substantial extension of coherence time. Our results establish spin-N-Cat codes as a scalable, hardware-efficient approach to QEC in spin-based quantum architectures.
We introduce a class of bosonic quantum error-correcting codes, termed extended binomial codes, which generalize the structure of one-mode binomial codes by incorporating ideas from high-rate qubit stabilizer codes. These codes are constructed in close analogy to [[n,k,d]] qubit codes, where the parameter n corresponds to the total excitation budget rather than the number of physical qubits. Our construction achieves a significant reduction in average excitation per mode while preserving error-correcting capabilities, offering improved compatibility with hardware constraints in the strong-dispersive regime. We demonstrate that extended binomial codes not only reduce the mean excitation required for encoding but also simplify syndrome extraction and logical gate implementation, particularly the logical X operation. These advantages suggest that extended binomial codes offer a scalable and resource-efficient approach for bosonic quantum error correction.
Rotation symmetric bosonic codes are an attractive encoding for qubits into oscillator degrees of freedom, particularly in superconducting qubit experiments. While these codes can tolerate considerable loss and dephasing, they will need to be combined with higher level codes to achieve large-scale devices. We investigate concatenating these codes with the planar code in a measurement-based scheme for fault-tolerant quantum computation. We focus on binomial codes as the base level encoding, and estimate break-even points for such encodings under loss for various types of measurement protocol. These codes are more resistant to photon loss errors, but require both higher mean photon numbers and higher phase resolution for gate operations and measurements. We find that it is necessary to implement adaptive phase measurements, maximum likelihood quantum state inference, and weighted minimum weight decoding to obtain good performance for a planar code using binomial code qubits.
The early Gottesman, Kitaev, and Preskill (GKP) proposal for encoding a qubit in an oscillator has recently been followed by cat- and binomial-code proposals. Numerically optimized codes have also been proposed, and we introduce codes of this type here. These codes have yet to be compared using the same error model; we provide such a comparison by determining the entanglement fidelity of all codes with respect to the bosonic pure-loss channel (i.e., photon loss) after the optimal recovery operation. We then compare achievable communication rates of the combined encoding-error-recovery channel by calculating the channel's hashing bound for each code. Cat and binomial codes perform similarly, with binomial codes outperforming cat codes at small loss rates. Despite not being designed to protect against the pure-loss channel, GKP codes significantly outperform all other codes for most values of the loss rate. We show that the performance of GKP and some binomial codes increases monotonically with increasing average photon number of the codes. In order to corroborate our numerical evidence of the cat-binomial-GKP order of performance occurring at small loss rates, we analytically evaluate the quantum error-correction conditions of those codes. For GKP codes, we find an essential singularity in the entanglement fidelity in the limit of vanishing loss rate. In addition to comparing the codes, we draw parallels between binomial codes and discrete-variable systems. First, we characterize one- and two-mode binomial as well as multiqubit permutation-invariant codes in terms of spin-coherent states. Such a characterization allows us to introduce check operators and error-correction procedures for binomial codes. Second, we introduce a generalization of spin-coherent states, extending our characterization to qudit binomial codes and yielding a multiqudit code.