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Physical Review A

Quantum error correction against correlated noise

James Clemens, Shabnam Siddiqui, Julio R. Gea-Banacloche

Published Jun 14, 2004• 67 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We consider quantum error correction against correlated noise using simple and concatenated Calderbank-Shor-Steane codes as well as $n$-qubit repetition codes. We characterize the performance of various codes by means of the fidelity following the error correction of a single logical qubit in a quantum register. For concatenated codes we find a threshold in the single-qubit error rate below which the encoded qubit is perfectly protected. The threshold depends on the correlation strength of the noise and goes to zero for perfect correlation. Finally, we concatenate the traditional error correcting codes with a decoherence free subspace and evaluate the performance over the whole range from uncorrelated noise to perfectly correlated noise.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.69.062313

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We consider quantum error correction against correlated noise using simple and concatenated Calderbank-Shor-Steane codes as well as nnn-qubit repetition codes. We characterize the performance of various codes by means of the fidelity following the error correction of a single logical qubit in a quantum register. For concatenated codes we find a threshold in the single-qubit error rate below which the encoded qubit is perfectly protected. The threshold depends on the correlation strength of the noise and goes to zero for perfect correlation. Finally, we concatenate the traditional error correcting codes with a decoherence free subspace and evaluate the performance over the whole range from uncorrelated noise to perfectly correlated noise.
We study the performance of simple quantum error correcting codes with respect to correlated noise errors characterized by a finite correlation strength. Specifically, we consider bit flip (phase flip) noisy quantum memory channels and use repetition and noiseless quantum codes. We characterize the performance of the codes by means of the entanglement fidelity as function of the error probability and degree of memory. Finally, comparing the entanglement fidelities of repetition and noiseless quantum codes, we find a threshold for the correlation strength that allows to select the code with better performance.
We compare the performance of quantum error correcting codes when memory errors are unitary with the more familiar case of dephasing noise. For a wide range of codes, we analytically compute the effective logical channel that results when the error correction steps are performed noiselessly. Our examples include the entire family of repetition codes, the five-qubit, Steane, Shor, and surface codes. When errors are measured in terms of the diamond norm, we find that the error correction is typically much more effective for unitary errors than for dephasing. We observe this behavior for a wide range of codes after a single level of encoding, and in the thresholds of concatenated codes using hard decoders. We show that this holds with great generality by proving a bound on the performance of any stabilizer code when the noise at the physical level is unitary. By comparing the diamond norm error ${D}_{\ensuremath{\diamond}}^{\ensuremath{'}}$ of the logical qubit with the same quantity at the physical level ${D}_{\ensuremath{\diamond}}$, we show that ${D}_{\ensuremath{\diamond}}^{\ensuremath{'}}\ensuremath{\le}c{D}_{\ensuremath{\diamond}}^{d}$ where ddd is the distance of the code and ccc is a constant that depends on the code but not on the error. This bound compares very favorably to the performance of error correction for dephasing noise and other Pauli channels, where an error correcting code of odd distance ddd will exhibit a scaling ${D}_{\ensuremath{\diamond}}^{\ensuremath{'}}\ensuremath{\sim}{D}_{\ensuremath{\diamond}}^{(d+1)/2}$.
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.
We study the properties of error correcting codes for noise models in the presence of asymmetries and/or correlations by means of the entanglement fidelity and the code entropy. First, we consider a dephasing Markovian memory channel and characterize the performance of both a repetition code and an error avoiding code ([Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text], respectively) in terms of the entanglement fidelity. We also consider the concatenation of such codes ([Formula: see text]) and show that it is especially advantageous in the regime of partial correlations. Finally, we characterize the effectiveness of the codes [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] by means of the code entropy and find, in particular, that the effort required for recovering such codes decreases when the error probability decreases and the memory parameter increases. Second, we consider both symmetric and asymmetric depolarizing noisy quantum memory channels and perform quantum error correction via the five-qubit stabilizer code [Formula: see text]. We characterize this code by means of the entanglement fidelity and the code entropy as function of the asymmetric error probabilities and the degree of memory. Specifically, we uncover that while the asymmetry in the depolarizing errors does not affect the entanglement fidelity of the five-qubit code, it becomes a relevant feature when the code entropy is used as a performance quantifier.
A formulation for evaluating the performance of quantum error correcting codes for a general error model is presented. In this formulation, the correlation between errors is quantified by a Hamiltonian description of the noise process. We classify correlated errors using the system-bath interaction: local versus nonlocal and two-body versus many-body interactions. In particular, we consider Calderbank-Shor-Steane codes and observe a better performance in the presence of correlated errors depending on the timing of the error recovery. We also find this timing to be an important factor in the design of a coding system for achieving higher fidelities.
When a logical qubit is protected using a quantum error-correcting code, the net effect of coding, decoherence (a physical channel acting on qubits in the codeword) and recovery can be represented exactly by an effective channel acting directly on the logical qubit. In this paper we describe a procedure for deriving the map between physical and effective channels that results from a given coding and recovery procedure. We show that the map for a concatenation of codes is given by the composition of the maps for the constituent codes. This perspective leads us to an efficient means for calculating the exact performance of quantum codes with arbitrary levels of concatenation. We present explicit results for single-bit Pauli channels. For certain codes under the symmetric depolarizing channel, we use the coding maps to compute exact threshold error probabilities for achievability of perfect fidelity in the infinite concatenation limit.