Experimental quantum coding against photon loss error

TL;DR

This paper experimentally demonstrates quantum error-correcting codes that protect against photon loss in optical quantum computing, showing the practical feasibility of overcoming qubit loss errors.

Contribution

First experimental implementation of quantum codes for photon loss error in both circuit and one-way quantum computing models.

Findings

Successfully encoded single-qubit states into entangled multiparticle codewords

Demonstrated protection of quantum information from detected photon loss

Proved the feasibility of quantum codes to mitigate qubit loss errors

Abstract

A significant obstacle for practical quantum computation is the loss of physical qubits in quantum computers, a decoherence mechanism most notably in optical systems. Here we experimentally demonstrate, both in the quantum circuit model and in the one-way quantum computer model, the smallest non-trivial quantum codes to tackle this problem. In the experiment, we encode single-qubit input states into highly-entangled multiparticle codewords, and we test their ability to protect encoded quantum information from detected one-qubit loss error. Our results prove the in-principle feasibility of overcoming the qubit loss error by quantum codes.