On Extending Capabilities of Quantum Error Correcting Codes to Handle Amplitude Damping Errors

Qubits, the building blocks of quantum computers, hold quantum states that store information. Through the operations of quantum gates, information embedded in the qubits can be manipulated. Unfortunately, the microscopic nature of qubits makes them susceptible to noise, and the gate operations they are subjected to can be erroneous themselves. These factors diminish the possibility of accurate calculations on actual quantum hardware; nevertheless, fault-tolerant quantum computing has been mathematically demonstrated. Fault-tolerant quantum computers employ qubit-controlling protocols with underlying quantum error-correcting codes (QEC) to consistently correct errors that arise due to the aforementioned factors. Predominantly, fault-tolerant protocols have been developed around QEC codes that correct a popular range of errors, namely, Pauli-errors. However, the performance of these codes is impaired by their limited capabilities in correcting various other types of errors, such as the amplitude-damping error. In this work, we investigate development of a framework to incorporate amplitude-damping error correction into the standard QEC codes. With this framework, we seek a higher accuracy fault-tolerance scheme against not only Pauli-based errors but amplitude-damping errors.