Protecting the orbital angular momentum of photonic qubits using quantum error correction

¹ State Key Laboratory of Low-Dimensional Quantum Physics and Department of Physics, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084 China
² Beijing Academy of Quantum Information Sciences - Beijing 100193, China
³ Frontier Science Center for Quantum Information - Beijing 100084, China
⁴ School of Information and Technology, Tsinghua University - Beijing 100084, China
⁵ Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology - Beijing 100084, China
⁶ School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing Normal University - Beijing 100084, China

Received: 2 June 2020
Accepted: 19 November 2020

Abstract

Photons with orbital angular momentum provide an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space. Here, we study the propagation of such photons in atmospheric turbulence and obtain the Kraus operator representation for the decoherence-induced noise. We apply quantum error correction to suppress this decoherence. Specifically, we treat correction as an optimization problem in which the distance between the actual channel and the desired channel is minimized. This method provides significant channel fidelity enhancement irrespective of the turbulence strength.