Quantifying Pauli Errors in Single-Photon Resource-State Generation

Abstract

We propose a scheme to compute Pauli error rates in photonics-based quantum error correction using experimental observables of single photons produced from quantum emitters. We show that first-order coherence measurements and first-order cross correlations, which can be implemented using photon counting, can extract single-photon and entangled single-photon wavefunctions in the presence of imperfections due to photon distinguishability, laser noise, and photon loss. Leveraging this, we show that the wavefunction of any entangled state of noisy photons produced from a single quantum emitter can be expressed in matrix-product-state form and can be used to analytically compute the expectation value of the stabilizer generators of the corresponding entangled state. From this we obtain analytic expressions for the Pauli error probabilities in terms of the photon noise parameters. Furthermore, we calculate Pauli error maps for entangled photons after undergoing Bell- state measurements in terms of these parameters. Our work provides a method to use experimental measurements to determine the required quality of photons produced from quantum emitters for fault-tolerant fusion-based photonics quantum computing.