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arXiv:quant-ph/0110111 · Physical Review A

Continuous quantum error correction via quantum feedback control

Charlene Ahn, Andrew C. Doherty, Andrew J. Landahl

Published Mar 14, 2002• 262 citations
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Abstract

We describe a protocol for continuously protecting unknown quantum states from decoherence that incorporates design principles from both quantum error correction and quantum feedback control. Our protocol uses continuous measurements and Hamiltonian operations, which are weaker control tools than are typically assumed for quantum error correction. We develop a cost function appropriate for unknown quantum states and use it to optimize our state-estimate feedback. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we study our protocol for the three-qubit bit-flip code in detail and demonstrate that it can improve the fidelity of quantum states beyond what is achievable using quantum error correction when the time between quantum error-correction cycles is limited.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.65.042301

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We describe a protocol for continuously protecting unknown quantum states from decoherence that incorporates design principles from both quantum error correction and quantum feedback control. Our protocol uses continuous measurements and Hamiltonian operations, which are weaker control tools than are typically assumed for quantum error correction. We develop a cost function appropriate for unknown quantum states and use it to optimize our state-estimate feedback. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we study our protocol for the three-qubit bit-flip code in detail and demonstrate that it can improve the fidelity of quantum states beyond what is achievable using quantum error correction when the time between quantum error-correction cycles is limited.
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Quantum mechanical applications range from quantum computers to quantum key distribution to teleportation. In these applications, quantum error correction is extremely important for protecting quantum states against decoherence. Here I present two main results regarding quantum error correction protocols. The first main topic I address is the development of continuous-time quantum error correction protocols via combination with techniques from quantum control. These protocols rely on weak measurement and Hamiltonian feedback instead of the projective measurements and unitary gates usually assumed by canonical quantum error correction. I show that a subclass of these protocols can be understood as a quantum feedback protocol, and analytically analyze the general case using the stabilizer formalism; I show that in this case perfect feedback can perfectly protect a stabilizer subspace. I also show through numerical simulations that another subclass of these protocols does better than canonical quantum error correction when the time between corrections is limited. The second main topic is development of improved overhead results for fault-tolerant computation. In particular, through analysis of topological quantum error correcting codes, it will be shown that the required blowup in depth of a noisy circuit performing a fault-tolerant computation can be reduced to a factor of O(log log L), an improvement over previous results. Showing this requires investigation into a local method of performing fault-tolerant correction on a topological code of arbitrary dimension.
We develop a protocol for continuous operation of a quantum error correcting code for protection of coherent evolution due to an encoded Hamiltonian against environmental errors, using the three-qubit bit-flip code and bit-flip errors as a canonical example. To detect errors in real time, we filter the output signals from continuous measurement of the error syndrome operators and use a double thresholding protocol for error diagnosis, while correction of errors is done as in the conventional operation. We optimize our continuous operation protocol for evolution under quantum memory and under quantum annealing, by maximizing the fidelity between the target and actual logical states at a specified final time. In the case of quantum memory, we show that our continuous operation protocol yields a logical error rate that is slightly larger than the one obtained from using the optimal Wonham filter for error diagnosis while being simpler to implement. For quantum annealing, we show that our continuous quantum error correction protocol can significantly reduce the final logical state infidelity when the continuous measurements are sufficiently strong relative to the strength of the time-dependent Hamiltonian. We also show that this continuous quantum error correction protocol can reduce the time-to-solution relative to the value obtained from a classical parallelization scheme. These results suggest that a continuous implementation is suitable for quantum error correction in the presence of encoded time-dependent Hamiltonians, opening the possibility of many applications in quantum simulation and quantum annealing.
We present an efficient approach to continuous-time quantum error correction that extends the low-dimensional quantum filtering methodology developed by van Handel and Mabuchi [quantph/0511221 (2005)] to include error recovery operations in the form of real-time quantum feedback. We expect this paradigm to be useful for systems in which error recovery operations cannot be applied instantaneously. While we could not find an exact low-dimensional filter that combined both continuous syndrome measurement and a feedback Hamiltonian appropriate for error recovery, we developed an approximate reduced-dimensional model to do so. Simulations of the five-qubit code subjected to the symmetric depolarizing channel suggests that error correction based on our approximate filter performs essentially identically to correction based on an exact quantum dynamical model.
We address the standard quantum error correction using the three-qubit bit-flip code, yet in continuous-time. This entails rendering a target manifold of quantum states globally attractive. Previous feedback designs could feature spurious equilibria, or resort to discrete kicks pushing the system away from these equilibria to ensure global asymptotic stability. We present a new approach that consists of introducing controls driven by Brownian motions. Unlike the previous methods, the resulting closed-loop dynamics can be shown to stabilize the target manifold exponentially. We further present a reduced-order filter formulation with classical probabilities. The exponential property is important to quantify the protection induced by the closed-loop error-correction dynamics against disturbances. We study numerically the performance of this control law and of the reduced filter.