Simulating the Effects of Quantum Error-correction Schemes

Abstract

It is important to protect quantum information against decoherence and operational errors, and quantum error-correcting (QEC) codes are the keys to solving this problem. Of course, just the existence of codes is not efficient. It is necessary to perform operations fault-tolerantly on encoded states because error-correction process (i.e., encoding, decoding, syndrome measurement and recovery) itself induces an error. By using simulation, this paper investigates the effects of some important QEC codes (the five qubit code, the seven qubit code and the nine qubit code) and their fault-tolerant operations when the error-correction process itself induces an error. The corresponding results, statistics and analyses are presented in this paper.