Fidelity of a t-error correcting quantum code with more than t errors

Abstract

It is important to study the behavior of a t-error correcting quantum code when the number of errors is greater than t, because it is likely that there are also small errors besides t large correctable errors. We give a lower bound for the fidelity of a t-error correcting stabilizer code over a general memoryless channel, allowing more than t errors. We also show that the fidelity can be made arbitrary close to 1 by increasing the code length.