A fundamental requirement for enabling fault-tolerant quantum information processing is an efficient quantum error-correcting code (QECC) that robustly protects the involved fragile quantum states from their environment. Just as classical error-corre
cting codes are indispensible in todays information technologies, it is believed that QECC will play a similarly crucial role in tomorrows quantum information systems. Here, we report on the first experimental demonstration of a quantum erasure-correcting code that overcomes the devastating effect of photon losses. Whereas {it errors} translate, in an information theoretic language, the noise affecting a transmission line, {it erasures} correspond to the in-line probabilistic loss of photons. Our quantum code protects a four-mode entangled mesoscopic state of light against erasures, and its associated encoding and decoding operations only require linear optics and Gaussian resources. Since in-line attenuation is generally the strongest limitation to quantum communication, much more than noise, such an erasure-correcting code provides a new tool for establishing quantum optical coherence over longer distances. We investigate two approaches for circumventing in-line losses using this code, and demonstrate that both approaches exhibit transmission fidelities beyond what is possible by classical means.
The sum gate is the canonical two-mode gate for universal quantum computation based on continuous quantum variables. It represents the natural analogue to a qubit C-NOT gate. In addition, the continuous-variable gate describes a quantum nondemolition
(QND) interaction between the quadrature components of two light fields. We experimentally demonstrate a QND sum gate, employing the scheme by R. Filip, P. Marek, and U.L. Andersen [pra {bf 71}, 042308 (2005)], solely based on offline squeezed states, homodyne measurements, and feedforward. The results are verified by simultaneously satisfying the criteria for QND measurements in both conjugate quadratures.
