Bosonic Codes for Continuous Variable Quantum Information Processing: Theory and Experiment

Ben Q. Baragiola

Negin Razian, En-Jui Chang, Hoi-Kwan Lau

Robust continuous-variable (CV) quantum information processing requires correcting realistic errors in bosonic systems, but all existing schemes rely on auxiliary Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) states which the preparation and operation are demanding in many platforms. In this work, we propose a novel CV quantum error correction (QEC) scheme that utilizes a broadly accessible resource: discrete-variable (DV) ancilla. Our scheme extracts information about CV displacement to the DV ancilla, measuring that allows counteracting the unwanted displacement error. We show that a simple single-qubit ancilla can already suppress CV infidelity by more than 20%. By concatenating with DV QEC codes, our scheme is robust against the physical errors in hybrid CV-DV systems, and yields a new class of oscillator-in-oscillator code that does not involve GKP states. Our work facilitates the implementation of CV QEC on realistic platforms.

Kyungjoo Noh

Quantum computation and communication are important branches of quantum information science. However, noise in realistic quantum devices fundamentally limits the utility of these quantum technologies. A conventional approach towards large-scale and fault-tolerant quantum information processing is to use multi-qubit quantum error correction (QEC), that is, to encode a logical quantum bit (or a logical qubit) redundantly over many physical qubits such that the redundancy can be used to detect errors. The required resource overhead associated with the use of conventional multi-qubit QEC schemes, however, is too high for these schemes to be realized at scale with currently available quantum devices. Recently, bosonic (or continuous-variable) quantum error correction has risen as a promising hardware-efficient alternative to multi-qubit QEC schemes. In this thesis, I provide an overview of bosonic QEC and present my contributions to the field. Specifically, I present the benchmark and optimization results of various single-mode bosonic codes against practically relevant excitation loss errors. I also demonstrate that fault-tolerant bosonic QEC is possible by concatenating a single-mode bosonic code with a multi-qubit error-correcting code. Moreover, I discuss the fundamental aspects of bosonic QEC using the framework of quantum communication theory. In particular, I present improved bounds on important communication-theoretic quantities such as the quantum capacity of bosonic Gaussian channels. Furthermore, I provide explicit bosonic error correction schemes that nearly achieve the fundamental performance limit set by the quantum capacity. I conclude the thesis with discussions on the importance of non-Gaussian resources for continuous-variable quantum information processing.

Takaya Matsuura

János A. Bergou, Mark S. Hillery, Mark E. Saffman

Thomas Décultot, Ronan Gautier, Mazyar Mirrahimi

Bosonic quantum error correction represents a route towards significant hardware overhead reduction for fault-tolerant quantum computation. However, controlling quantum harmonic oscillators that encode the quantum information comes with its own challenges. In many platforms such as superconducting circuits and trapped ions, the bosonic degree of freedom is controlled by an ancillary qubit whose decay during a qubit-oscillator gate propagates to the oscillator as a continuous error. Such errors generally lie beyond the scope of errors that the bosonic code is capable of correcting. We introduce the continuous-variable flag: an auxiliary oscillator coupled to the ancilla whose phase-space position encodes the continuous error corrupting the storage mode. After the gate, a heterodyne measurement of the flag estimates this continuous-variable error and a subsequent feedback control undoes it up to a bosonic code stabilizer. The scheme requires no new ingredients, as the flag is driven by the same dispersive coupling, displacements and rotations that implement the gates it is supposed to protect. We construct sequences protecting conditional rotations to all orders in ancilla decay with one flag, and conditional displacements to first order with one flag and to all orders with two. Simulations with realistic circuit-QED parameters predict more than three orders of magnitude fewer logical errors for the parity measurement of a four-component cat code, and a finite-energy GKP logical lifetime near its noiseless-ancilla bound. By discretizing continuous-variable errors, the flags introduced in this work are a useful tool for any hybrid oscillator-qubit processor, and open the route towards fault-tolerant simulation and computation with bosonic modes.