Improving Quantum Error Correction Performance with Steane’s Scheme
Joint work between the Müller group and the trapped-ion quantum computing group at Innsbruck successfully implements a scheme by Steane that enhances the performance of quantum error correction, demonstrating significant advantages in managing noise for various quantum error-correction codes.
To harness the full advantage that quantum computation is promising to deliver, large-scale systems with high-quality gate operations are required. Given the inherent sensitivity to the noise that quantum information processors possess, currently, there is no platform that can provide such high-performance gate operations natively, presumably rendering error correction indispensable for advantageous quantum computation.
In collaboration with the experimental trapped-ion quantum computing group at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, the Müller group shows the first experimental implementation of a scheme proposed by Steane that minimizes the overhead for fault-tolerant quantum error correction. Therefore, this scheme promises to increase error-correction performance on noisy quantum processors.
The authors show the implementation of multiple cycles of Steane error correction on various quantum error-correction codes. They demonstrate the operation of the bit-flip and phase-flip repetition codes below their respective break-even thresholds utilizing the scheme proposed by Steane. Furthermore, they present the practical advantage of Steane error correction over an alternative state-of-the-art protocol for the widely used seven-qubit color code. The experimental results are underpinned by circuit-level numerical simulations that suggest a performance advantage of up to a factor of 2 of Steane error correction over competing protocols.
The emergence of growing register sizes and operational capabilities in various quantum computing architectures facilitates exploiting the high degree of modularity and parallelism that Steane error correction offers. Leveraging the benefits Steane error correction provides, the implementation of quantum error correction can be sped up while improving its performance, as shown in this work.
Publication:
Demonstration of Fault-Tolerant Steane Quantum Error Correction. Lukas Postler, Friederike Butt, Ivan Pogorelov, Christian D. Marciniak, Sascha Heußen, Rainer Blatt, Philipp Schindler, Manuel Rispler, Markus Müller, and Thomas Monz. PRX Quantum 5, 030326 – Published 7 August 2024
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PRXQuantum.5.030326