Hierarchical generation and design of quantum codes for resource-efficient loss-tolerant quantum communications

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new hierarchical protocol for generating loss-tolerant quantum codes that enables faster encoding and decoding, reducing losses and improving quantum communication efficiency.

Contribution

The authors present a novel hierarchical encoding scheme with static feedback hardware and optimized code structures, enhancing loss-tolerance and performance in quantum repeaters.

Findings

Fast encoding and decoding significantly reduce loss in quantum communication.

Optimized code structures improve error correction performance.

Numerical simulations show increased repeater rates with fewer photons.

Abstract

We develop novel protocols for generating loss-tolerant quantum codes; these are central for safeguarding information against qubit losses, with most crucial applications in quantum communications. Contrary to current proposals, our method enables top-to-bottom fast encoding and decoding, thereby significantly reducing the additional losses due to the lagging and photon-reordering at the repeater stations. At the hardware level, we show how to achieve this with a single quantum emitter equipped with a static feedback mechanism, which we leverage to engineer entangling gates between a fed-back qubit and multiple emitted qubits in parallel. In addition, analyzing typical patterns within the error-correction decoding graphs, we find optimizations of the code structure, which enable higher performance by also reducing the code size; these are based on the introduction of asymmetries in the code, which mimic the intrinsic adaptiveness of the recovery procedure. We show numerically that these improvements together significantly enhance the loss-correction performance, with major advantages in quantum repeater protocols, where the fast recovery scheme (decoding-encoding) allows for improved repeater rates with smaller photon numbers per code.