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arXiv:2509.11544 · Physical Review A

Efficient preparation of decoherence-free subspace basis states

Zi-Ming Li, Yu-xi Liu

Published Dec 9, 2025• 0 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Decoherence-free subspace (DFS) provides a crucial mechanism for passive error mitigation in quantum computation by encoding information within symmetry-protected subspaces of the Hilbert space, which are immune from collective decoherence. Constructing a complete set of orthogonal basis states for the DFS is essential to realize fault-tolerant quantum computation by using the DFS codes. However, existing methods for preparing these basis states are often non-scalable, platform-specific, or yield mixed states. Here, we propose a deterministic approach to prepare pure, orthogonal and complete DFS basis states for systems of arbitrary size composed of qubits. Our method employs projective measurements and quantum circuits with single-qubit, two-qubit and Toffoli gates. We provide a rigorous resource cost analysis both mathematically and numerically. Meanwhile, we demonstrate the realizability of our method on NISQ devices by discussing how to implement our method on a superconducting chip. The proposed method offers a universal solution for preparing the DFS basis states across diverse quantum computing platforms and system sizes, which is realizable in the NISQ era.

DOI
10.1103/ndjm-z894

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Decoherence-free subspace (DFS) provides a crucial mechanism for passive error mitigation in quantum computation by encoding information within symmetry-protected subspaces of the Hilbert space, which are immune from collective decoherence. Constructing a complete set of orthogonal basis states for the DFS is essential to realize fault-tolerant quantum computation by using the DFS codes. However, existing methods for preparing these basis states are often non-scalable, platform-specific, or yield mixed states. Here, we propose a deterministic approach to prepare pure, orthogonal and complete DFS basis states for systems of arbitrary size composed of qubits. Our method employs projective measurements and quantum circuits with single-qubit, two-qubit and Toffoli gates. We provide a rigorous resource cost analysis both mathematically and numerically. Meanwhile, we demonstrate the realizability of our method on NISQ devices by discussing how to implement our method on a superconducting chip. The proposed method offers a universal solution for preparing the DFS basis states across diverse quantum computing platforms and system sizes, which is realizable in the NISQ era.
Decoherence-free subspaces and subsystems (DFS) preserve quantum information by encoding it into symmetry-protected states unaffected by decoherence. An inherent DFS of a given experimental system may not exist; however, through the use of dynamical decoupling (DD), one can induce symmetries that support DFSs. Here, we provide the first experimental demonstration of DD-generated decoherence-free subsystem logical qubits. Utilizing IBM Quantum superconducting processors, we investigate two and three-qubit DFS codes comprising up to six and seven noninteracting logical qubits, respectively. Through a combination of DD and error detection, we show that DFS logical qubits can achieve up to a 23% improvement in state preservation fidelity over physical qubits subject to DD alone. This constitutes a beyond-breakeven fidelity improvement for DFS-encoded qubits. Our results showcase the potential utility of DFS codes as a pathway toward enhanced computational accuracy via logical encoding on quantum processors.
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In quantum computing, symmetry plays a central role in protecting qubits from errors. This work develops an efficient approach to creating decoherence-free subspaces for logical qubits, by optimally transferring the states of physical qubits via concatenated dynamical decoupling. This method bears a distinct superiority for many-qubit systems, owing to its polynomial speedup over previous approaches, which makes it promising for generating a higher-dimensional decoherence-free subspace to encode more protected logical qubits for fault-tolerant quantum computation.
In general, implementing a multi-logical-qubit gate by manipulating quantum states in a decoherence-free subspace (DFS) becomes more complex and difficult when increasing the number of logical qubits. In this work, we propose an idea to realize quantum gates by manipulating quantum states outside their DFS but having the states of the logical qubits remain in their DFS before and after the gate operation. This proposal has the following features: (i) because the states are manipulated outside the DFS, the multiqubit gate implementation can be simplified when compared to realizing a multiqubit gate via manipulating quantum states within the DFS, which usually requires unitary operations over a large DFS, and (ii) because the states of the logical qubits return to the DFS after the gate operation, the errors caused by decoherence during the gate operation are not accumulated for a long-running calculation, and the states of the logical qubits are immune to decoherence when they are stored. Based on this proposal, we then present a way for realizing a multi-target-qubit controlled-not gate using logical qubits encoded in a decoherence-free subspace against collective dephasing. This gate is realized by employing qutrits (three-level quantum systems) placed in a cavity or coupled to a resonator. This proposal has the following advantages: (i) the states of the logical qubits return to their DFS after the gate operation; (ii) the gate can be implemented with only a few basic operations; (iii) the gate operation time is independent of the number of logical qubits; (iv) this gate can be deterministically implemented because no measurement is needed; (v) the intermediate higher-energy level for all qutrits is not occupied during the entire operation, thus decoherence from this level is greatly suppressed; (vi) this proposal is universal and can be applied to realize the proposed gate using natural atoms or artificial atoms (e.g., quantum dots, nitrogen-vacancy centers, and various superconducting qutrits, etc.) placed in a cavity or coupled to a resonator. As an application, we also show how to apply this gate to create a Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) entangled state of multiple logical qubits encoded in DFS, and further investigate the experimental feasibility for creating the GHZ state of three logical qubits in the DFS, by using six superconducting transmon qutrits coupled to a one-dimensional coplanar waveguide resonator.
In quantum computing, nice error bases as generalization of the Pauli basis were introduced by Knill. These bases are known to be projective representations of finite groups. In this paper, we propose a group representation approach to the study of quantum stabilizer codes. We utilize this approach to define decoherence-free subspaces (DFSs). Unlike previous studies of DFSs, this type of DFSs does not involve any spatial symmetry assumptions on the system-environment interaction. Thus, it can be used to construct quantum error-avoiding codes (QEACs) that are fault tolerant automatically. We also propose a new simple construction of QEACs and subsequently develop several classes of QEACs. Finally, we present numerical simulation results encoding the logical error rate over physical error rate on the fidelity performance of these QEACs. Our study demonstrates that DFSs-based QEACs are capable of providing a generalized and unified framework for error-avoiding methods.
Quantum error-correcting codes (QECCs) and decoherence-free subspace (DFS) codes provide active and passive means, respectively, to address certain types of errors that arise during quantum computation. The latter technique is suitable to correct correlated errors with certain symmetries and the former to correct independent errors. The concatenation of a QECC and a DFS code results in a degenerate code that splits into actively and passively correcting parts, with the degeneracy impacting either part, leading to degenerate errors as well as degenerate stabilizer operators. The concatenation of the two types of code can aid universal fault-tolerant quantum computation when a mix of correlated and independent errors is encountered. In particular, we show that for sufficiently strongly correlated errors, the concatenation with the DFS as the inner code provides better entanglement fidelity, whereas for sufficiently independent errors, the concatenation with the QECC as the inner code is preferable. As illustrative examples, we examine in detail the concatenation of a two-qubit DFS code and a three-qubit repetition code or five-qubit Knill-Laflamme code, under independent and correlated errors.