QUANTUM ERROR CORRECTION WITHOUT MEASUREMENT AND AN EFFICIENT RECOVERY OPERATION
Chi-Kwong Li, Mikio Nakahara, Yiu‐Tung Poon, Nung-Sing Sze, Hiroyuki Tomita · arXiv (Cornell University) · 2011
1. IntroductionQuantum system is vulnerable to disturbance from the external environment, which leads todecoherence in the system. We have to overcome this difficulty to realize a working quanutumcomputer and a dependable quantum information processing. Quantum error correction (QEC)[1, 2, 3] is one of the most promising candidates for overcoming decoherence.QEC proposals to date are separated roughly into two classes, one employs extra ancilla qubitsfor error syndrome readout while the other, called operator quantum error correction (OQEC)employs a higher rank projection operator. However, the schemes have not been built in actualquantum computing or quantum information processing so far. This is dueto the following obstaclesinherent in these QECs; the syndrome must be read out by introducing ancilla qubits duringcomputing/information processing in the former case, while realization of a high-rank projectionoperator is physically challenging in the latter case.It was shown in [4] that for some quantum channels there exist different QECs in which nosyndrome measurements, no ancillas and no projection operators were required. Recovery operationand decoding operation are combined into a single unitary operation and the output state is a directproductof a decoded qubitstate and an ancilla state. Aqubit state isreproducedwithout recoveringthe codeword and, moreover, the projection operation is automatically built in our output state.The purpose of this paper is to extend the results in [4] to general quantum channels. We showthat for any quantum channel there is a unitary recovery operation, with which the output stateis a tensor product of decoded qubit state and an ancilla state. As a result, a decoding scheme canbe done by a unitary gate followed by a partial trace operation.The rest of the paper is organized as follows. We introduce the basic notions of OQEC andthen prove the main theorem in Section 2. We also give simple examples demonstrating our resultand a simplified proof of a theorem given in [2] illustrating that our recovery channel can be usedto do correction for many other channels related to ours. Section 3 is devoted to summary anddiscussions.