1 research outputs found
Quantum optical coherence can survive photon losses: a continuous-variable quantum erasure correcting code
A fundamental requirement for enabling fault-tolerant quantum information
processing is an efficient quantum error-correcting code (QECC) that robustly
protects the involved fragile quantum states from their environment. Just as
classical error-correcting codes are indispensible in today's information
technologies, it is believed that QECC will play a similarly crucial role in
tomorrow's quantum information systems. Here, we report on the first
experimental demonstration of a quantum erasure-correcting code that overcomes
the devastating effect of photon losses. Whereas {\it errors} translate, in an
information theoretic language, the noise affecting a transmission line, {\it
erasures} correspond to the in-line probabilistic loss of photons. Our quantum
code protects a four-mode entangled mesoscopic state of light against erasures,
and its associated encoding and decoding operations only require linear optics
and Gaussian resources. Since in-line attenuation is generally the strongest
limitation to quantum communication, much more than noise, such an
erasure-correcting code provides a new tool for establishing quantum optical
coherence over longer distances. We investigate two approaches for
circumventing in-line losses using this code, and demonstrate that both
approaches exhibit transmission fidelities beyond what is possible by classical
means.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure