Quantum computers have been shown to be able to perform computations that are thus far thought to be infeasible through classical computation. This is achieved by taking advantage of certain properties and phenomena unique to quantum systems. Unfortunately, engineering particular quantum systems that are useful for computation is difficult and there is still a long road towards building a robust, large-scale quantum computer. A key approach to building quantum computers that are robust to noise is the development of Quantum Error Correcting codes. In recent years, there have been a surge of progress in the development and realisation of bosonic codes, which are quantum error correcting codes that encode quantum information into the infinite-dimensional Hilbert space of an oscillator. Due to its large Hilbert space, bosonic codes are able to protect quantum information using a single, or a few physical systems. This thesis will take two different but complementary approaches to the development of bosonic codes and bosonic code qubits. The first will be a numerical study of errors affecting bosonic codes within a fault-tolerant system. Specifically, we introduce the concatenated Bacon-Shor rotation-symmetric bosonic code and evaluate the entanglement fidelity of a teleportation based error correction scheme against pure loss errors. In the second approach, we study the recently proposed gyrator qubit by Rymarz et al., which realises a bosonic code known as the Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) code in its low energy eigenspace. We support this study with a Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin (WKB) analysis of the Zak transformed Hamiltonian of the qubit. This allows us to derive the low-energy spectrum and eigenstates of the qubit and derive matrix elements corresponding to transitions between qubit states when the system is weakly coupled to a thermal environment.
Quantum computers have been shown to be able to perform computations that are thus far thought to be infeasible through classical computation. This is achieved by taking advantage of certain properties and phenomena unique to quantum systems. Unfortunately, engineering particular quantum systems that are useful for computation is difficult and there is still a long road towards building a robust, large-scale quantum computer. A key approach to building quantum computers that are robust to noise is the development of Quantum Error Correcting codes. In recent years, there have been a surge of progress in the development and realisation of bosonic codes, which are quantum error correcting codes that encode quantum information into the infinite-dimensional Hilbert space of an oscillator. Due to its large Hilbert space, bosonic codes are able to protect quantum information using a single, or a few physical systems. This thesis will take two different but complementary approaches to the development of bosonic codes and bosonic code qubits. The first will be a numerical study of errors affecting bosonic codes within a fault-tolerant system. Specifically, we introduce the concatenated Bacon-Shor rotation-symmetric bosonic code and evaluate the entanglement fidelity of a teleportation based error correction scheme against pure loss errors. In the second approach, we study the recently proposed gyrator qubit by Rymarz et al., which realises a bosonic code known as the Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) code in its low energy eigenspace. We support this study with a Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin (WKB) analysis of the Zak transformed Hamiltonian of the qubit. This allows us to derive the low-energy spectrum and eigenstates of the qubit and derive matrix elements corresponding to transitions between qubit states when the system is weakly coupled to a thermal environment.
A promising route towards fault-tolerant quantum error correction is the concatenation of a Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) code with a qubit code. Development of such concatenated codes requires simulation tools which realistically model noise, while being able to simulate the dynamics of many modes. However, so far, large-scale simulation tools for concatenated GKP codes have been limited to idealized noise models and GKP code implementations. Here, we introduce the Bosonic Pauli+ model (BP+), which can be simulated efficiently for a large number of modes, while capturing the rich dynamics in the bosonic multi-mode Hilbert space. We demonstrate the method by simulating a hybrid surface code, where the data qubits are finite-energy GKP qubits stabilized using the small-Big-small (sBs) protocol, and the syndrome qubits are standard two-level systems. Using BP+, we present logical error rates of such an implementation. Confidence in the accuracy of the method is gained by comparing its predictions with full time evolution simulations for several relevant quantum circuits. While developed specifically for GKP qubits stabilized using the sBs protocol, the mathematical structure of BP+ is generic and may be applicable also to the simulation of concatenations using other bosonic codes.
Quantum information is vulnerable to environmental noise and experimental imperfections, hindering the reliability of practical quantum information processors. Therefore, quantum error correction (QEC) that can protect quantum information against noise is vital for universal and scalable quantum computation. Among many different experimental platforms, superconducting quantum circuits and bosonic encodings in superconducting microwave modes are appealing for their unprecedented potential in QEC. During the last few years, bosonic QEC is demonstrated to reach the break-even point, i.e. the lifetime of a logical qubit is enhanced to exceed that of any individual components composing the experimental system. Beyond that, universal gate sets and fault-tolerant operations on the bosonic codes are also realized, pushing quantum information processing towards the QEC era. In this article, we review the recent progress of the bosonic codes, including the Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill codes, cat codes, and binomial codes, and discuss the opportunities of bosonic codes in various quantum applications, ranging from fault-tolerant quantum computation to quantum metrology. We also summarize the challenges associated with the bosonic codes and provide an outlook for the potential research directions in the long terms.
Quantum error correction is essential for robust quantum-information processing with noisy devices. As bosonic quantum systems play a role in quantum sensing, communication, and computation, it is useful to design error-correction codes suitable for these systems against various different types of noises. While most efforts aim at protecting qubits encoded into the infinite-dimensional Hilbert space of a bosonic mode, Ref. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 125, 080503 (2020)] proposed an error-correction code to maintain the infinite-dimensional-Hilbert-space nature of bosonic systems by encoding a single bosonic mode into multiple bosonic modes. Enabled by Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill states as ancilla, the code overcomes the no-go theorem of Gaussian error correction. In this work, we generalize the error-correction code to the scenario with general correlated and heterogeneous Gaussian noises, including memory effects. We introduce Gaussian preprocessing and postprocessing to convert the general noise model to an independent but heterogeneous collection of additive white Gaussian noise channels and then apply concatenated codes in an optimized manner. To evaluate the performance, we develop a theory framework to enable the efficient calculation of the noise SD after the error correction, despite the non-Gaussian nature of the codes. Our code provides the optimal scaling of the residue-noise SD with the number of modes and can be widely applied to distributed sensor networks, network communication, and composite quantum-memory systems.
(Abridged.) This thesis investigates scalable fault-tolerant quantum computation through the development of bosonic quantum codes, quantum LDPC codes, and decoding protocols that connect continuous-variable and discrete-variable error correction. We investigate superconducting microwave implementations of continuous-variable quantum computing, including the deterministic generation of cubic phase states, and introduce the dissipatively stabilized squeezed cat qubit, a noise-biased bosonic encoding with enhanced error suppression and faster gates. The performance of rotation-symmetric and GKP codes is analyzed under realistic noise and measurement models, revealing key trade-offs in measurement-based schemes. To integrate bosonic codes into larger architectures, we develop decoding methods that exploit analog syndrome information, enabling quasi-single-shot decoding in concatenated systems. On the discrete-variable side, we introduce localized statistics decoding, a highly parallelizable decoder for quantum LDPC codes, and propose quantum radial codes, a new family of single-shot LDPC codes with low overhead and strong circuit-level performance. Finally, we present fault complexes, a homological framework for analyzing faults in dynamic quantum error correction protocols. Extending the role of homology in static CSS codes, fault complexes provide a general language for the design and analysis of fault-tolerant schemes.
Bosonic quantum error-correcting codes offer a viable direction towards reducing the hardware overhead required for fault-tolerant quantum information processing.A broad class of bosonic codes, namely rotation-symmetric codes, can be characterized by their phase-space rotation symmetry.However, their performance has been examined to date only within an idealistic noise model.Here, we further analyze the error-correction capabilities of rotation-symmetric codes using a teleportation-based error-correction circuit.To this end, we numerically compute the average gate fidelity, including measurement errors into the noise model of the data qubit.Focusing on physical measurement models, we assess the performance of heterodyne and adaptive homodyne detection in comparison to the previously studied canonical phase measurement.This setting allows us to shed light on the role of different currently available measurement schemes when decoding the encoded information.We find that with the currently achievable measurement efficiencies in microwave optics, bosonic rotation codes undergo a substantial decrease in their break-even potential.In addition, we perform a detailed analysis of Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) codes using a similar error-correction circuit that allows us to analyze the effect of realistic measurement models on different codes.In comparison to RSB codes, we find for GKP codes an even greater reduction in performance together with a vulnerability to photon-number dephasing.Our results show that highly efficient measurement protocols constitute a crucial building block towards error-corrected quantum information processing with bosonic continuous-variable systems.
To be useful, quantum computers will be required to successfully correct errors occurring at the hardware level. Bosonic codes provide a hardware-efficient option for error correction, but fault-tolerance further requires that the available gate interactions be compatible with the code. A promising bosonic code is the Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) code, for which a linear beamsplitter-like coupling between two bosonic modes is fault-tolerant, making this a key primitive for building larger systems. Here, using two motional modes of a trapped ion, we demonstrate the generation of entangled states of GKP qubits by interfering two qunaught states, which have a grid structure but carry no logical information, on a beamsplitter. We generate all four Bell states with an average fidelity of 69%, and subsequently demonstrate an extension of the entangled state lifetime through the use of quantum error correction. These results complete the set of Gaussian operations required for quantum computing with GKP codes and enable explorations of multi-mode bosonic encodings as well as fundamental tests of information channels.