arXiv:2604.11857
Blind Catalytic Quantum Error Correction: Target-State Estimation and Fidelity Recovery Without \textit{A Priori} Knowledge
Hikaru Wakaura
Abstract
Catalytic quantum error correction (CQEC) recovers quantum states via catalytic covariant transformations but requires full knowledge of the target state. We introduce blind CQEC, which estimates the target from the noisy output alone before catalytic recovery. Five estimation strategies are benchmarked across three noise models (dephasing, depolarizing, amplitude damping), four quantum algorithms ($d = $4-64), Haar-random states up to $d = 256$, and mixed-state targets with variable purity. Key results: (i)coherence maximization achieves $F_{rec} > 0.95$ for $d \leq 16$ without noise-model knowledge, matching the oracle to within $4\%$; (ii)channel inversion is required at $d = 64 (F_{rec} = 0.905$); (iii)estimation and recovery fidelities are linearly correlated ($r > 0.99$), identifying target estimation as the sole bottleneck; (iv)an analytical crossover dimension $d^* \approx $25-40 separates noise-model-free and noise-informed regimes, bridged by a hybrid interpolation strategy; (v)copy scaling follows $1 - F(n) \sim n^{-α}$ with $α\in [0.4, 2.2]$, spanning the statistical averaging and denoising synergy limits. Direct comparison with standard quantum error mitigation (ZNE, PEC, virtual distillation) shows that blind coherence maximization uniquely achieves state-level recovery without noise-model knowledge, while blind channel inversion matches PEC's fidelity at single-copy overhead. An end-to-end VQE demonstration for H$_2$ shows $3.4\times$ energy-error reduction with channel-inversion blind CQEC, and a circuit-level sanity check on qiskit-aer confirms that the density-matrix predictions translate to small noisy circuits. We also derive an analytical Lipschitz bound $F_{rec} \geq 1 - 2\|\hatρ_{est} - ρ_{target}\|_1$ for the density-matrix-level recovery map, providing the theoretical underpinning for the empirical estimation-recovery correlation.