The entanglement fidelity and quantum error correction

Abstract

Two new expressions for the entanglement fidelity recently introduced by Schumacher (LANL e-print quant-ph/9604023, to appear in Phys. Rev. A) are derived. These expressions show that it is the entanglement fidelity which must be maximized when performing error correction on qubits for quantum computers, not the fidelity, which is the most-often used generalization of the probability for storing a qubit correctly.