title: Experimental quantum coding against qubit loss error.
abstract: The fundamental unit for quantum computing is the qubit, an isolated, controllable two-level system. However, for many proposed quantum computer architectures, especially photonic systems, the qubits can be lost or can leak out of the desired two-level systems, posing a significant obstacle for practical quantum computation. Here, we experimentally demonstrate, both in the quantum circuit model and in the one-way quantum computer model, the smallest nontrivial quantum codes to tackle this problem. In the experiment, we encode single-qubit input states into highly entangled multiparticle code words, and we test their ability to protect encoded quantum information from detected 1-qubit loss error. Our results prove in-principle the feasibility of overcoming the qubit loss error by quantum codes.
authors.affiliation: Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at Microscale and Department of Modern Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230026, People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: Chao-Yang
authors.initials: CY
authors.lastname: Lu
authors.forename: Wei-Bo
authors.initials: WB
authors.lastname: Gao
authors.forename: Jin
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Xiao-Qi
authors.initials: XQ
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.forename: Tao
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.forename: Jian-Wei
authors.initials: JW
authors.lastname: Pan
mesh_terms: D003199:Computer Systems; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D011789:Quantum Theory