Catalytic Coherence Amplification for Quantum State Recovery: Theory, Numerical Validation, and Comparison with Conventional Error Correction

Abstract: We present Catalytic Quantum Error Correction (CQEC), a quantum state recovery protocol based on the arbitrary amplification of coherence in catalytic covariant transformations. Unlike conventional quantum error correction, CQEC requires knowledge of the target state and multiple noisy copies, but operates without an error threshold: recovery succeeds whenever the coherent modes of the target state are contained within those of the noisy state (mode inclusion), regardless of the noise magnitude. A reusable catalyst state mediates the transformation and its reduced state is preserved exactly after each cycle (correlated catalysis). We validate CQEC numerically across four quantum algorithms -- qDRIFT, quantum Kolmogorov--Arnold networks, control-free phase estimation, and Regev factoring -- and a tree tensor network cryptographic protocol, under dephasing, depolarizing, and combined noise. In the asymptotic (infinite-copy) limit, CQEC recovers the known algorithmic output state from fidelity $F = 0.07$ to $F > 0.999$ across 200 configurations; at finite copy number $n$, the fidelity gap scales as $1 - F \leq O(1/\sqrt{n})$. We compare with Steane and surface codes under their respectively different operational assumptions. Our results establish coherence resource theory as a complementary foundation for quantum state recovery.