Quantum Codes Do Not Increase Fidelity against Isotropic Errors

In this article, we study the ability of error-correcting quantum codes to increase the fidelity of quantum states throughout a quantum computation. We analyze arbitrary quantum codes that encode all qubits involved in the computation, and we study the evolution of n-qubit fidelity from the end of one application of the correcting circuit to the end of the next application. We assume that the correcting circuit does not introduce new errors, that it does not increase the execution time (i.e. its application takes zero seconds) and that quantum errors are isotropic. We show that the quantum code increases the fidelity of the states perturbed by quantum errors but that this improvement is not enough to justify the use of quantum codes. Namely, we prove that, taking into account that the time interval between the application of the two corrections is multiplied (at least) by the number of qubits n (due to the coding), the best option is not to use quantum codes, since the fidelity of the uncoded state over a time interval n times smaller is greater than that of the state resulting from the quantum code correction.

Performance of entanglement-assisted quantum codes with noisy ebits over asymmetric and memory channels

Entanglement-assisted quantum error correction codes(EAQECCs)play an important role in quantum communications with noise.Such a scheme can use arbitrary classical linear code to transmit qubits over noisy quantum channels by consuming some ebits between the sender(Alice)and the receiver(Bob).It is usually assumed that the preshared ebits of Bob are error free.However,noise on these ebits is unavoidable in many cases.In this work,we evaluate the performance of EAQECCs with noisy ebits over asymmetric quantum channels and quantum channels with memory by computing the exact entanglement fidelity of several EAQECCs.We consider asymmetric errors in both qubits and ebits and show that the performance of EAQECCs in entanglement fidelity gets improved for qubits and ebits over asymmetric channels.In quantum memory channels,we compute the entanglement fidelity of several EAQECCs over Markovian quantum memory channels and show that the performance of EAQECCs is lowered down by the channel memory.Furthermore,we show that the performance of EAQECCs is diverse when the error probabilities of qubits and ebits are different.In both asymmetric and memory quantum channels,we show that the performance of EAQECCs is improved largely when the error probability of ebits is reasonably smaller than that of qubits.