Entanglement Cost of Erasure Correction in Quantum MDS Codes

Abstract: In distributed quantum storage, physical qubits of a code will be stored across the network. When qubits in one of the nodes are lost i.e. when the node is erased, the remaining nodes need to communicate with a new node to replace the lost qubits. Here, we look at the problem of how much entanglement cost is needed to perform such a distributed quantum erasure correction. We focus on distributed quantum storage based on quantum maximum distance separable (MDS) codes. We derive lower bounds on the entanglement cost when the quantum network used for the erasure correction has a star topology. We show that the simple method of downloading the non-erased qudits and performing operations at a single node is optimal when the minimal number of non-erased nodes are accessed. It remains to be seen what the entanglement cost will be when a non-minimal number of non-erased nodes are accessed. The techniques used in this work can be developed further to study the entanglement cost of quantum erasure correction in more general code families and network topologies.