Noisy Quantum Trees: Infinite Protection Without Correction

TL;DR

This paper investigates quantum networks with tree structures, demonstrating conditions under which quantum information and entanglement can propagate infinitely despite noise, highlighting a form of protection without active error correction.

Contribution

It introduces a quantum tree model with Clifford encoders and analyzes noise thresholds, showing infinite information propagation under certain conditions without error correction.

Findings

Quantum information decays exponentially above certain noise thresholds.

For small noise, classical information and entanglement propagate infinitely.

Certain 2-qubit encoders enable infinite propagation even with minimal code distance.

Abstract

We study quantum networks with tree structures, in which information propagates from a root to leaves. At each node in the network, the received qubit unitarily interacts with fresh ancilla qubits, after which each qubit is sent through a noisy channel to a different node in the next level. Therefore, as the tree depth grows, there is a competition between the irreversible effect of noise and the protection against such noise achieved by delocalization of information. In the classical setting, where each node simply copies the input bit into multiple output bits, this model has been studied as the broadcasting or reconstruction problem on trees, which has broad applications. In this work, we study the quantum version of this problem. We consider a Clifford encoder at each node that encodes the input qubit in a stabilizer code, along with a single qubit Pauli noise channel at each edge. Such noisy quantum trees describe a scenario in which one has access to a stream of fresh (low-entropy) ancilla qubits, but cannot perform error correction. Therefore, they provide a different perspective on quantum fault tolerance. Furthermore, they provide a useful model for describing the effect of noise within the encoders of concatenated codes. We prove that above certain noise thresholds, which depend on the properties of the code such as its distance, as well as the properties of the encoder, information decays exponentially with the depth of the tree. On the other hand, by studying certain efficient decoders, we prove that for codes with distance d>=2 and for sufficiently small (but non-zero) noise, classical information and entanglement propagate over a noisy tree with infinite depth. Indeed, we find that this remains true even for binary trees with certain 2-qubit encoders at each node, which encode the received qubit in the binary repetition code with distance d=1.