On Protected Realizations of Quantum Information

There are two complementary approaches to realizing quantum information so that it is protected from a given set of error operators. Both involve encoding information by means of subsystems. One is initialization-based error protection, which involves a quantum operation that is applied before error events occur. The other is operator quantum error correction, which uses a recovery operation applied after the errors. Together, the two approaches make it clear how quantum information can be stored at all stages of a process involving alternating error and quantum operations. In particular, there is always a subsystem that faithfully represents the desired quantum information. We give a definition of faithful realization of quantum information and show that it always involves subsystems. This justifies the "subsystems principle" for realizing quantum information. In the presence of errors, one can make use of noiseless, (initialization) protectable, or error-correcting subsystems. We give an explicit algorithm for finding optimal noiseless subsystems. Finding optimal protectable or error-correcting subsystems is in general difficult. Verifying that a subsystem is error-correcting involves only linear algebra. We discuss the verification problem for protectable subsystems and reduce it to a simpler version of the problem of finding error-detecting codes.Comment: 17 page

Schrodinger cat animated on a quantum computer

We present a quantum algorithm which allows to simulate chaos-assisted tunneling in deep semiclassical regime on existing quantum computers. This opens new possibilities for investigation of macroscopic quantum tunneling and realization of semiclassical Schr\"odinger cat oscillations. Our numerical studies determine the decoherence rate induced by noisy gates for these oscillations and propose a suitable parameter regime for their experimental implementation.Comment: research at Quantware MIPS Center http://www.quantware.ups-tlse.fr ; revtex, 4 pages, 4 figure

Stabilizer states and Clifford operations for systems of arbitrary dimensions, and modular arithmetic

We describe generalizations of the Pauli group, the Clifford group and stabilizer states for qudits in a Hilbert space of arbitrary dimension d. We examine a link with modular arithmetic, which yields an efficient way of representing the Pauli group and the Clifford group with matrices over the integers modulo d. We further show how a Clifford operation can be efficiently decomposed into one and two-qudit operations. We also focus in detail on standard basis expansions of stabilizer states.Comment: 10 pages, RevTe