How much entanglement is needed for quantum error correction?

Abstract

It is commonly believed that logical states of quantum error-correcting codes have to be highly entangled such that codes capable of correcting more errors require more entanglement to encode a qubit. Here, we show that the validity of this belief depends on the specific code and the choice of entanglement measure. To this end, we characterize a tradeoff between the code distance $d$ quantifying the number of correctable errors, and the geometric entanglement measure of logical states quantifying their maximal overlap with product states or more general ``topologically trivial" states. The maximum overlap is shown to be exponentially small in $d$ for three families of codes: (1) low-density parity check codes with commuting check operators, (2) stabilizer codes, and (3) codes with a constant encoding rate. Equivalently, the geometric entanglement of any logical state of these codes grows at least linearly with $d$. On the opposite side, we also show that this distance-entanglement tradeoff does not hold in general. For any constant $d$ and $k$ (number of logical qubits), we show there exists a family of codes such that the geometric entanglement of some logical states approaches zero in the limit of large code length.

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Contextuality of Quantum Error-Correcting Codes
• Experimental measurement and a physical interpretation of quantum shadow enumerators
• Matrix-product entanglement characterizing the optimality of state-preparation quantum circuits
• Quantum Routing and Entanglement Dynamics Through Bottlenecks
• A graph-based approach to entanglement entropy of quantum error correcting codes