Improving Performance of an Analog Electronic Device Using Quantum Error Correction

The development of the field of quantum information processing has resulted in countless techniques which exploit the properties of quantum mechanical systems in order to perform useful computational tasks. In this talk we discuss a particular application of protocols developed in the field quantum error correction (QEC) to a seemingly disparate field. The usefulness of analog classical systems for computation is generally thought to be complicated by the susceptibility of these devices to noise and the lack of a clear framework for achieving fault-tolerance. We present results for the application of quantum error correction techniques to a prototype analog computational device called a quantum emulation device (QED). It is shown that for the gates tested (Z, X and SH) there is a marked improvement in the performance characteristics. Gate performance after QEC, as measured by the average log-fidelity (-log₁₀(1-F)), increases by 2.15. This corresponds to a reduction in the infidelity of the gate operations by more than two orders of magnitude on average.