Quantum error correction with the color-Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill code

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how concatenating the GKP bosonic code with the 2D color code and applying advanced decoding algorithms enhances quantum error correction thresholds, improving fault tolerance in quantum computing.

Contribution

It introduces a concatenated GKP-color code scheme with novel decoding strategies, significantly improving error thresholds over standard color codes.

Findings

Threshold of 13.3% with noiseless measurements

Threshold of 24% with noisy measurements

Effective decoding with the generalized Restriction Decoder

Abstract

The Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) code is an important type of bosonic quantum error-correcting code. Since the GKP code only protects against small shift errors in $\hat{p}$ and $\hat{q}$ quadratures, it is necessary to concatenate the GKP code with a stabilizer code for the larger error correction. In this paper, we consider the concatenation of the single-mode GKP code with the two-dimension (2D) color code (color-GKP code) on the square-octagon lattice. We use the Steane type scheme with a maximum-likelihood estimation (ME-Steane scheme) for GKP error correction and show its advantage for the concatenation. In our main work, the minimum-weight perfect matching (MWPM) algorithm is applied to decode the color-GKP code. Complemented with the continuous-variable information from the GKP code, the threshold of 2D color code is improved. If only data GKP qubits are noisy, the threshold reaches $\sigma\approx 0.59$ $(\bar{p}\approx13.3\%)$ compared with $\bar{p}=10.2\%$ of the normal 2D color code. If measurements are also noisy, we introduce the generalized Restriction Decoder on the three-dimension space-time graph for decoding. The threshold reaches $\sigma\approx 0.46$ when measurements in the GKP error correction are noiseless, and $\sigma\approx 0.24$ when all measurements are noisy. Lastly, the good performance of the generalized Restriction Decoder is also shown on the normal 2D color code giving the threshold at $3.1\%$ under the phenomenological error model.