Bosonic quantum error correction codes in superconducting quantum circuits

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent advances in bosonic quantum error correction codes within superconducting circuits, highlighting experimental progress, implementations of universal gates, and future opportunities for scalable quantum computing.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of recent experimental achievements and discusses future research directions in bosonic QEC codes for quantum information processing.

Findings

Bosonic QEC codes have reached the break-even point.

Universal gate sets and fault-tolerant operations have been realized.

Opportunities extend to quantum computation and metrology.

Abstract

Quantum information is vulnerable to environmental noise and experimental imperfections, hindering the reliability of practical quantum information processors. Therefore, quantum error correction (QEC) that can protect quantum information against noise is vital for universal and scalable quantum computation. Among many different experimental platforms, superconducting quantum circuits and bosonic encodings in superconducting microwave modes are appealing for their unprecedented potential in QEC. During the last few years, bosonic QEC is demonstrated to reach the break-even point, i.e. the lifetime of a logical qubit is enhanced to exceed that of any individual components composing the experimental system. Beyond that, universal gate sets and fault-tolerant operations on the bosonic codes are also realized, pushing quantum information processing towards the QEC era. In this article, we review the recent progress of the bosonic codes, including the Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill codes, cat codes, and binomial codes, and discuss the opportunities of bosonic codes in various quantum applications, ranging from fault-tolerant quantum computation to quantum metrology. We also summarize the challenges associated with the bosonic codes and provide an outlook for the potential research directions in the long terms.