Trade-offs on number and phase shift resilience in bosonic quantum codes

TL;DR

This paper investigates the trade-offs in bosonic quantum codes between number and phase shift resilience, showing limitations for single-mode codes and proposing multi-mode codes for better error correction.

Contribution

It demonstrates the non-existence of effective single-mode codes for Gaussian dephasing and introduces multi-mode codes as a solution for improved error correction.

Findings

Single-mode g-gapped codes cannot effectively correct Gaussian dephasing errors.

Multi-mode g-gapped codes can achieve good approximate error correction.

Trade-offs exist between number shift and phase shift resilience in bosonic codes.

Abstract

Quantum codes typically rely on large numbers of degrees of freedom to achieve low error rates. However each additional degree of freedom introduces a new set of error mechanisms. Hence minimizing the degrees of freedom that a quantum code utilizes is helpful. One quantum error correction solution is to encode quantum information into one or more bosonic modes. We revisit rotation-invariant bosonic codes, which are supported on Fock states that are gapped by an integer $g$ apart, and the gap $g$ imparts number shift resilience to these codes. Intuitively, since phase operators and number shift operators do not commute, one expects a trade-off between resilience to number-shift and rotation errors. Here, we obtain results pertaining to the non-existence of approximate quantum error correcting $g$-gapped single-mode bosonic codes with respect to Gaussian dephasing errors. We show that by using arbitrarily many modes, $g$-gapped multi-mode codes can yield good approximate quantum error correction codes for any finite magnitude of Gaussian dephasing and amplitude damping errors.