Exploring Noiseless Subsystems via Nuclear Magnetic Resonance

Abstract

Noiseless subsystems offer a general and efficient method for protecting quantum information in the presence of noise that has symmetry properties. A paradigmatic class of error models displaying non-trivial symmetries emerges under collective noise behavior, which implies a permutationally-invariant interaction between the system and the environment. We describe experiments demonstrating the preservation of a bit of quantum information encoded in a three qubit noiseless subsystem for general collective noise. A complete set of input states is used to determine the super-operator for the implemented one-qubit process and to confirm that the fidelity of entanglement is improved for a large, non-commutative set of engineered errors. To date, this is the largest set of error operators that has been successfully corrected for by any quantum code.

21 pages, 5 encapsulated eps figures, REVTeX4. Substantially expanded description of work reported in Science 293, 2059 (2000), including additional theoretical considerations and experimental results