Overcoming erasure errors with multilevel systems

Abstract: We investigate the usage of highly efficient error correcting codes of multilevel systems to protect encoded quantum information from erasure errors and implementation to repetitively correct these errors. Our scheme makes use of quantum polynomial codes to encode quantum information and generalizes teleportation based error correction for multilevel systems to correct photon losses and operation errors in a fault-tolerant manner. We discuss the application of quantum polynomial codes to one-way quantum repeaters. For various types of operation errors, we identify different parameter regions where quantum polynomial codes can achieve a superior performance compared to qubit based quantum parity codes.