Efficient Quantum Error Correction of Dephasing Induced by a Common Fluctuator

Quantum error correction is expected to be essential in large-scale quantum technologies. However, the substantial overhead of qubits it requires is thought to greatly limit its utility in smaller, near-term devices. Here we introduce a new family of special-purpose quantum error-correcting codes that offer an exponential reduction in overhead compared to the usual repetition code. They are tailored for a common and important source of decoherence in current experiments, whereby a register of qubits is subject to phase noise through coupling to a common fluctuator, such as a resonator or a spin defect. The smallest instance encodes one logical qubit into two physical qubits, and corrects decoherence to leading-order using a constant number of one- and two-qubit operations. More generally, while the repetition code on n qubits corrects errors to order t(O(n)), with t the time between recoveries, our codes correct to order t(O(2n)). Moreover, they are robust to model imperfections in small- and intermediate-scale devices, where they already provide substantial gains in error suppression. As a result, these hardware-efficient codes open a potential avenue for useful quantum error correction in near-term, pre-fault tolerant devices.