The advantage of the concatenated three-qubit codes

TL;DR

This paper presents an efficient, modular quantum error-correction protocol using concatenated three-qubit codes, which improves fidelity and fault tolerance with fewer resources compared to other codes.

Contribution

The work introduces a novel concatenation-based quantum error-correction scheme leveraging three-qubit codes, optimized for non-ideal gate operations and resource efficiency.

Findings

Effective channel fidelity reaches 0.94731 with 4-level concatenation for amplitude damping noise.

The protocol requires fewer qubits and gates than five-qubit codes at high accuracy.

Higher fault tolerance threshold without increased complexity.

Abstract

In this work, the efficient quantum error-correction protocol against the general independent noise is constructed with the three-qubit codes. The rules of concatenation are summarized according to the error-correcting capability of the codes. The codes not only play the role of correcting errors, but the role of polarizing the effective channel. For any independent noise, the most suitable error-correction protocol can be constructed based on the rules of concatenation. The most significant aspect of using the concatenated three-qubit codes is to realize quantum error-correction with the non-ideal gate operations, because the error-correction schemes of the three-qubit codes are simple and modular. For example, for the amplitude damping noise with the initial channel fidelity 0.9, the effective channel fidelity can reach 0.94731 (or 0.961634 with the ideal quantum gate operations) when using the 4 levels concatenated quantum error-correction with the three-qubit codes. The protocol with the three-qubit codes needs 81 qubits and 366 quantum gate operations when the accuracy rate is 0.9995. Meanwhile, when using the 3 levels concatenated quantum error-correction with the five-qubit code, the effective channel fidelity can only reach 0.922798 (or 0.975488 with the ideal quantum gate operations). The protocol with the five-qubit code needs 125 qubits and 1147 quantum gate operations when the accuracy rate is 0.9995. The physical resources costed is multiple of the physical resources costed by realizing the three-qubit quantum error-correction, the protocol has a higher fault tolerance threshold, and no increase in complexity. So, we believe it will be helpful for realizing quantum error-correction in the physical system.