Decoding quantum errors with subspace expansions

Abstract

With rapid developments in quantum hardware comes a push towards the first practical applications. While fully fault-tolerant quantum computers are not yet realized, there may exist intermediate forms of error correction that enable practical applications. In this work, we consider the idea of post-processing error decoders using existing quantum codes, which mitigate errors on logical qubits using post-processing without explicit syndrome measurements or additional qubits beyond the encoding overhead. This greatly simplifies the experimental exploration of quantum codes on real, near-term devices, removing the need for locality of syndromes or fast feed-forward. We develop the theory of the method and demonstrate it on an example with the perfect [[5, 1, 3]] code, which exhibits a pseudo-threshold of p ≈ 0.50 under a single qubit depolarizing channel applied to all qubits. We also provide a demonstration of improved performance on an unencoded hydrogen molecule. Fault-tolerant quantum computation is still far, but there could be ways in which quantum error correction could improve currently available devices. Here, the authors show how to exploit existing quantum codes through only post-processing and random measurements in order to mitigate errors in NISQ devices.