Quantum Error Correction in Continuous-Variable System

Abstract

On the physical level, digital computers are not error free. However, by adding the redundancy and using the error-correction technique, the errors on the computational level can be mitigated to the point that the probability of error occurring is negligible for most tasks. In quantum computation, a similar strategy can be employed. Here, a main difference between classical computer and quantum computer is that the quantum error correction needs to mitigate the errors, while maintaining the quantum coherence. In this chapter, we will first discuss the conceptual ideas of how to implement quantum error correction and achieve fault tolerance in the continuous-variable system. In the case of the continuous-variable system, we need to first encode the information using a logical qubit which, in a sense, digitize the broad Hilbert space. We will give some examples of the logical qubits and then discuss a particular type of encoding called Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) qubit, which is one of the currently most promising encoding.