Trade-offs on number and phase shift resilience in bosonic quantum codes

Abstract: Quantum codes typically rely on large numbers of degrees of freedom to achieve low error rates. However each additional degree of freedom introduces a new set of error mechanisms. Hence minimizing the degrees of freedom that a quantum code utilizes is helpful. One quantum error correction solution is to encode quantum information into one or more bosonic modes. We revisit rotation-invariant bosonic codes, which are supported on Fock states that are gapped by an integer $g$ apart, and the gap $g$ imparts number shift resilience to these codes. Intuitively, since phase operators and number shift operators do not commute, one expects a trade-off between resilience to number-shift and rotation errors. Here, we obtain results pertaining to the non-existence of approximate quantum error correcting $g$-gapped single-mode bosonic codes with respect to Gaussian dephasing errors. We show that by using arbitrarily many modes, $g$-gapped multi-mode codes can yield good approximate quantum error correction codes for any finite magnitude of Gaussian dephasing and amplitude damping errors.