Taming the decoherence demon with entangled states

An Introduction to Quantum Error Correction

 Overline
(1) What is error correction in the first place?
(2) What is information in the quantum language?
(3) The problem with quantum information and quantum bits.
(4) What is quantum entanglement?
(5) Quantum error correction with entangled states.
 (1)
What is error correction in the first place?
Classical error correction
A bit flip is not just a bit flip

Credits: Veritasium
by Derek Muller
 Noisy channels for communication causes erraneous messages

Hi alice Hi alsey ..?

We need to identify errors and correct them – error correction

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For classical bits there is only one type of error – Flipping the bit

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How can we get protection from these flippings?
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Simple way, use several bits to encode single bit and majority vote –
The Repetition code in classical error correction.

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Suppose first bit flipped
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Majority voting says it was
 (2)
What is information in the quantum language?
Quantum Information 1.1
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Its simple! Quantum states are quantum information.
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The smallest unit of information - quantum-bit or a qubit in short.
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A qubit(i.e, its state) lives in a 2D Hilbert space.

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Alpha and beta - complex numbers satisfying normalization.
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Global phases - no measurable significance.
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But relative phases – important.
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Effectively only two degrees of freedom.
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States lie on a sphere – Bloch sphere

Michael A. Nielsen, Isaac L. Chuang, Quantum Computation and Quantum Information, Cambridge university press(2010).
 Quantum bits are(little) complicated

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As qubits can be in superposition states. They can have variety of errors.

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Decoherance – Definite phase relationships(coherence) is disturbed

Michael A. Nielsen, Isaac L. Chuang, Quantum Computation and Quantum Information, Cambridge university press(2010).
 (3)
The problem with quantum information and quantum bits
Need for some cool trick
Can repeating qubits save from errors?
 The no cloning theorem – Quantum States cannot be copied

Measurement

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Infinte number of measurements are required to get alpha and beta accurately.
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Quantum rules are against copying quantum information.

Michael A. Nielsen, Isaac L. Chuang, Quantum Computation and Quantum Information, Cambridge university press(2010).
 Can repeating qubits save from errors?

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Need some sophisticated method that conforms to the quantum rules.
 (4)
What is quantum entanglement?
The spooky action at a distance
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You need more than one party to have entanglement.
i.e, there is no entanglement for single qubit
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State is called product state if it can be written like this.

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Example for a product state,

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If it is not a product state it is an entangled state.
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Example of an entangled state, the Bell state,

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Another one we will meet soon,

R. Horodecki, Paweł Horodecki, Michał Horodecki, and Karol Horodecki, Quantum Entanglement, Rev. Mod. Phys. 81, 865(2009).
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Why entanglement is important?
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One can teleport quantum states utilizing entanglement as a resource –
Quantum teleportation.

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One can send two classical bits of information by actually communicating only
one classical bit and with a preshared Bell pair– Dense coding.
➢
Quantum cryptography.
➢
...
➢
Quantum gravity.
➢
We will see how entangled state help us to protect quantum information
from decoherence in a moment.
R. Horodecki, Paweł Horodecki, Michał Horodecki, and Karol Horodecki, Quantum Entanglement, Rev. Mod. Phys. 81, 865(2009).
 (5)
Quantum error correction with entangled states
Fighting the decoherence demon
 The three qubit bit flip code(simplest)
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Simplest quantum error correcting code that protects from single qubit bit flips.
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Encoding for the logical qubit(the codewords)

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Any single bit flip can be detected by measuring following two syndromes followed
by appropriate error correction to get back the original state.

Michael A. Nielsen, Isaac L. Chuang, Quantum Computation and Quantum Information, Cambridge university press(2010).
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Example error on second qubit.

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Measuring syndromes.
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Possible syndromes and error correction.

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Thus syndromes tells you,
1. Is there a bit flip error?
2. If yes on which qubit?
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Hence you can correct the error by appropriate reverse operation and
get back the original state.
 Bit flip code with syndrome measurements

three qubits encoding

one qubit state Syndrome qubits

Encoding Error channel Syndromes Error correction

 Drawbacks

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What if there are two bit flip errors? Suppose 1,2 qubits got bit flip error.

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The syndromes will tell you that there is a bit flip on 3rd qubit -> logical error!!!
 Drawbacks

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What if there is a phase flip error? Suppose qubit 1 got a phase flip.

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Syndromes will tell no error occurred!
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No error detected so you cannot correct the error!!
The quantum circuit for bit flip code without syndrome measurements

The noisy quantum channel with bit flip

three qubits encoding These “entangle” qubits

one qubit state

credits: IBMQ qiskit

 The phase flip code
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Quantum error correcting code that protects from single qubit phase flips.
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Encoding for the logical qubit(the codewords)

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Where,

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Syndromes will be,

Michael A. Nielsen, Isaac L. Chuang, Quantum Computation and Quantum Information, Cambridge university press(2010).
 The nine qubit Shor code
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First quantum error correcting code that can correct arbitrary single qubit
errors including bit flip, phase flip and bit-phase flip.
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Logical codewords,

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Following are the 8 syndrome measurements that will specify the error.

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Not an optimal code but it shown quantum error correction is possible and
quantum information can be preserved.
Peter W Shor, Scheme for reducing decoherence in quantum computer memory, Phys. Rev. A 52, R2493(R)(1995)
 The quantum circuit for Shor code

Error corrected
Input state
state

Noisy channel

credits: IBMQ qiskit

 The surface code

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Syndromes are the plaquette and vertex operators.

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Codewords are states that have +1 value for all
syndromes.
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On a torus there will be 4, and on a plane there will
be 2 such entangled states
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Errors will be detected by -1 values of syndromes.
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A square lattice of size can correct upto

length error chains.

Austin G. Fowler, Matteo Mariantoni, John M. Martinis, and Andrew N. Cleland, Surface codes: Towards practical large-scale quantum computation, Phys. Rev. A 86, 032324 (2012).
Thank you
 How arbitrary errors can be corrected
Consider the arbitrary phase error,

The state before syndrome measurement is a superposition of erroaneous and error less
state.

Upon syndrome measurements, the state collapses to no error state with a probability,
, and a phase flip error with probability,