State preservation by repetitive error detection in a superconducting quantum circuit

Abstract

Quantum computing becomes viable when a quantum state can be preserved from environmentally-induced error. If quantum bits (qubits) are sufficiently reliable, errors are sparse and quantum error correction (QEC) 1-6 is capable of identifying and correcting them. Adding more qubits improves the preservation by guaranteeing increasingly larger clusters of errors will not cause logical failure -a key requirement for large-scale systems. Using QEC to extend the qubit lifetime remains one of the outstanding experimental challenges in quantum computing. Here, we report the protection of classical states from environmental bit-flip errors and demonstrate the suppression of these errors with increasing system size. We use a linear array of nine qubits, which is a natural precursor of the twodimensional surface code QEC scheme 7 , and track errors as they occur by repeatedly performing projective quantum non-demolition (QND) parity measurements. Relative to a single physical qubit, we reduce the failure rate in retrieving an input state by a factor of 2.7 for five qubits and a factor of 8.5 for nine qubits after eight cycles. Additionally, we tomographically verify preservation of the non-classical Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state. The successful suppression of environmentally-induced errors strongly motivates further research into the many exciting challenges associated with building a large-scale superconducting quantum computer.The ability to withstand multiple errors during computation is a critical aspect of error correction. We define n-th order fault-tolerance to mean that any combination of n errors is tolerable. Previous experiments based on nuclear magnetic resonance 8,9 , ion traps 10 , and superconducting circuits [11][12][13] have demonstrated multi-qubit states that are first-order tolerant to one type of error. Recently, experiments with ion traps and superconducting circuits have shown the simultaneous detection of multiple types of errors 14,15 . The above hallmark experiments demonstrate error correction in a single round; however, quantum information must be preserved throughout computation using multiple error correction cycles. The basics of repeating cycles have been shown in ion traps 16 and superconducting circuits 17 . Until now, it has been an open challenge to combine these elements to make the information stored in a quantum system robust against errors which intrinsically arise from the environment.The key to detecting errors in quantum information is to perform QND parity measurements. In the surface code, this is done by arranging qubits in a chequerboard pattern -with data qubits corresponding to the white, and measure qubits to the black squares (see Fig. 1) -and using these ancilla measure qubits to repetitively perform parity measurements to detect bit-flip (X) and phase-flip (Ẑ) errors 7 . A square chequerboard with (4n + 1) 2 qubits is n-th order fault tolerant, meaning at least n+1 errors must occur to cause failure in preserving a state if fidelities are above a threshold. W...

Majorana Fermion Surface Code for Universal Quantum Computation

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“…Despite the rapid progress in obtaining longer qubit coherence times [3][4][5] , current experimental efforts to demonstrate quantum circuits employ pre-threshold quantum information processors 2,6,7 . Hence it is essential to determine the effects that noise has both on errorcorrection codes and on specific algorithms.…”