Measurement based fault tolerant error correcting quantum codes on foliated cluster states

Abstract

Quantum communication and computation is an emerging field in quantum mechanics. There are many promising applications including secure communications, simulation of complex quantum systems or quantum algorithms which perform faster than classical methods. The main barrier to realising these possibilities is coping with the inevitable errors induced by noise and experimental imperfections. Quantum error correction is a process which allows for the storage and retrieval of encoded qubits with high fidelity even in an imperfect environment. Error correction operates by encoding qubit states into a subspace of a larger system of qubits. The presence of errors is detected by performing stabilizer measurements. These measurements do not act on the encoding subspace and the measurement results, or syndrome, can be used to infer errors. The decoding problem is to use syndrome information to find the most likely errors which have occurred. This is performed using classical computing resources. Once the errors have been inferred operations can be applied to the system to counteract their effect. While many quantum error correcting codes are known not all are suitable in a practical setting. When choosing a potential code we must consider the following. Does the construction use simple interactions that can be physically realised? How high is the physical qubit to encoded qubit overhead? Does an efficient decoder exist? Is the encoding scheme scalable and do the error correcting properties improve with scaling? All of these properties are desirable for a practical scheme, though some compromise may be required. In this thesis I show how cluster states can be used as a resource for implementing CSS quantum codes. Additionally I show how these cluster codes can be linked together in a layered fashion to create foliated codes. These foliated codes can be used with any constituent CSS code as a basis for fault tolerant error correction. This process is an extension of Raussendorf’s toric code measurement based processing scheme. I first generalise this measurement based scheme to all CSS quantum codes, which is presented in chapter 3. I then present a novel decoding scheme for foliated turbo codes, chapter 4, and present the decoding performance of some turbo code families in chapter 5. These turbo codes are a class of finite rate codes whose overhead and complexity are flexible. Chapter 6 presents the decoding performance of foliated bicycle codes. The low overhead of physical resources to logical qubits of both these code families make these foliated schemes an attractive alternative to the toric code when considering practical measurement based computing designs with large numbers of encoded qubits.