Error suppression in multicomponent cat codes with photon subtraction and teleamplification

Abstract

It is known that multiphoton states can be protected from decoherence due to a passive loss channel by applying noiseless attenuation before and noiseless amplification after the channel. In this work, we propose the combined use of multiphoton subtraction on four-component cat codes and teleamplification to effectively suppress errors under detection and environmental losses. The back-action from multiphoton subtraction modifies the encoded qubit encoded on cat states by suppressing the higher photon numbers, while simultaneously ensuring that the original qubit can be recovered effectively through teleamplification followed by error correction, thus preserving its quantum information. With realistic photon subtraction and teleamplification-based scheme followed by optimal error-correcting maps, one can achieve a worst-case fidelity (over all encoded pure states) of over 93.5% (82% with only noisy teleamplification) at a minimum success probability of about 3.42%, under a 10% environmental-loss rate, 95% detector efficiency and sufficiently large cat states with the coherent-state amplitudes of 2. This sets a promising standard for combating large passive losses in quantum-information tasks in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era, such as direct quantum communication or the storage of encoded qubits on the photonic platform.