We study the performance of the 3-quhit decoherence-free subsystem and the 4-quhitdecoherence-free subspace in the presence of partially correlated noise. We characterizetheir performance in terms ...
We study the performance of the 3-qubit decoherence-free subsystem and the 4-qubit decoherence-free subspace in the presence of partially correlated noise. We characterize their performance in terms of the average and worst-case fidelity, as a function of the ratio of the interqubit distance to the correlation length of the noise, and find that, in general, more symmetric arrangements (triangles or squares) lead to better performance. Overall, we find the 3-qubit code to perform better than the 4-qubit code by about a factor of 2 in the average infidelity. We observe that this is related to the greater robustness of this code against uncorrelated (independent) errors.
A system subjected to noise contains a decoherence-free subspace or subsystem (DFS) only if the noise possesses an exact symmetry. Here we consider noise models in which a perturbation breaks a symmetry of the noise, so that if S is a DFS under a given noise process it is no longer so under the new perturbed noise process. We ask whether there is a subspace or subsystem that is more robust to the perturbed noise than S. To answer this question we develop a numerical method that allows us to search for subspaces or subsystems that are maximally robust to arbitrary noise processes. We apply this method to a number of examples, and find that a subsystem that is a DFS is often not the subsystem that experiences minimal noise when the symmetry of the noise is broken by a perturbation. We discuss which classes of noise have this property.