Automating Quantum Error Correction*

While a new quantum revolution is upon us, much work is needed to scale up quantum computers to a level which will be useful to society at large. However, schemes to encode quantum information, in order to maintain fidelity, vary as widely as the hardware being developed to process it. Each encoding scheme requires a unique circuit to detect and correct for errors, which is often calculated manually. Therefore, in order to increase the scaling rate of quantum computers, we will need a way to reliably automate this process. Our research accomplishes this first by taking a given encoding scheme, and its corresponding detection scheme, as input. We looked at the most common class of errors, called Pauli errors (X,Z,Y), and created a process to analyze how the circuit changes when introduced to these errors. We used these results to generate corresponding dictionaries for both X and Z errors. These dictionaries are a set of bit strings corresponding to where the error occurred in the circuit. We then used these bit strings to derive a corresponding error correction circuit. The key point here being that given a certain detection scheme as input, the code we created automatically outputs and applies the necessary corrections. Our work is an important step in more efficiently obtaining reliable quantum information and increasing the rate at which quantum computers can be developed.