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arXiv:quant-ph/0004072

An Introduction to Quantum Error Correction

Daniel Gottesman

Published Apr 18, 2000• 77 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Quantum states are very delicate, so it is likely some sort of quantum error correction will be necessary to build reliable quantum computers. The theory of quantum error-correcting codes has some close ties to and some striking differences from the theory of classical error-correcting codes. Many quantum codes can be described in terms of the stabilizer of the codewords. The stabilizer is a finite Abelian group, and allows a straightforward characterization of the error-correcting properties of the code. The stabilizer formalism for quantum codes also illustrates the relationships to classical coding theory, particularly classical codes over GF(4), the finite field with four elements.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.quant-ph/0004072

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Quantum states are very delicate, so it is likely some sort of quantum error correction will be necessary to build reliable quantum computers. The theory of quantum error-correcting codes has some close ties to and some striking differences from the theory of classical error-correcting codes. Many quantum codes can be described in terms of the stabilizer of the codewords. The stabilizer is a finite Abelian group, and allows a straightforward characterization of the error-correcting properties of the code. The stabilizer formalism for quantum codes also illustrates the relationships to classical coding theory, particularly classical codes over GF(4), the finite field with four elements.
Quantum states are very delicate, so it is likely some sort of quantum error correction will be necessary to build reliable quantum computers. The theory of quantum error-correcting codes has some close ties to and some striking differences from the theory of classical error-correcting codes. Many quantum codes can be described in terms of the stabilizer of the codewords. The stabilizer is a finite Abelian group, and allows a straightforward characterization of the error-correcting properties of the code. The stabilizer formalism for quantum codes also illustrates the relationships to classical coding theory, particularly classical codes over GF(4), the finite field with four elements. To build a quantum computer which behaves correctly in the presence of errors, we also need a theory of fault-tolerant quantum computation, instructing us how to perform quantum gates on qubits which are encoded in a quantum error-correcting code. The threshold theorem states that it is possible to create a quantum computer to perform an arbitrary quantum computation provided the error rate per physical gate or time step is below some constant threshold value.
The goal of this paper is to provide a self contained detailed and rigorous mathematical introduction to some aspects of the quantum error-correcting codes and especially quantum stabilizer codes without venturing much, if at all, into the world of physics. While most of the results presented are not new, it is not easy to extract a precise mathematical formulation of results and to provide their rigorous proofs by reading the vast number of papers in the field, quite a few of which are written by computer scientists or physicists. It is this formulation and proofs - quite a few of of them new - that we present here. The connections between (a) quantum stabilizer codes and classical self-orthogonal codes and (b) between error correction and error detection have been established in details. Techniques from algebra of finite fields as well as representations of finite abelian groups have been employed here.
Codeword-stabilized quantum codes provide a unified approach to constructing quantum error-correcting codes, including both additive and nonadditive quantum codes. Standard codeword-stabilized quantum codes encode quantum information into subspaces. The more general notion of encoding quantum information into a subsystem is known as an operator (or subsystem) quantum error-correcting code. Most operator codes studied to date are based in the usual stabilizer formalism. We introduce operator quantum codes based on the codeword-stabilized quantum code framework. Based on the necessary and sufficient conditions for operator quantum error correction, we derive an error-correction condition for operator codeword-stabilized quantum codes. Based on this condition, the word operators of a operator codeword-stabilized quantum code are constructed from a set of classical binary errors induced by generators of the gauge group. We use this scheme to construct examples of both additive and nonadditive codes that encode quantum information into a subsystem.
An introduction to quantum error correction (QEC) is given, and some recent developments are described. QEC consists of two parts: the physics of error processes and their reversal, and the construction of quantum error–correcting codes. Errors are caused both by imperfect quantum operations, and by coupling between the quantum system and its environment. Any such process can be analysed into a sum of ‘error operators’, which are tensor products of Pauli spin operators. These are the analogues of classical error vectors. A quantum error correcting code is a set of orthogonal states, ‘quantum codewords’, which behave in a certain useful way under the action of the most likely error operators. A computer or channel which only uses such states can be corrected by measurements which determine the error while yielding no information about which codeword or superposition of codewords is involved. Powerful codes can be found using a construction based on classical error–correcting codes. An analysis which allows even the corrective operations themselves to be imperfect leads to powerful and counter–intuitive results: the quantum coherence of a long quantum computation can be preserved even though every qubit in the computer relaxes spontaneously many times before the computation is complete.
Recently, the field of quantum error-correcting codes has rapidly emerged as an important discipline. As quantum information is extremely sensitive to noise, it seems unlikely that any large scale quantum computation is feasible without quantum error-correction. In this paper we give a brief exposition of the theory of quantum stabilizer codes. We review the stabilizer formalism of quantum codes, establish the connection between classical codes and stabilizer codes and the main methods for constructing quantum codes from classical codes. In addition to the expository part, we include new results that cannot be found elsewhere. Specifically, after reviewing some important bounds for quantum codes, we prove the nonexistence of pure perfect quantum stabilizer codes with minimum distance greater than 3. Finally, we illustrate the general methods of constructing quantum codes from classical codes by explicitly constructing two new families of quantum codes and conclude by showing how to construct new quantum codes by shortening.