New Approach to Quantum Error Correction

Operator quantum error correction provides a unified framework for the known techniques of quantum error correction such as the standard error correction model, the method of decoherence-free subspaces, and the noiseless subsystem method. We first show an example of a new quantum error correction scheme which can not be described by operation quantum error correction. Then we introduce a different notion of noiseless subsystems according to the example. Base on this notion, we present a more unified approach which incorporates operator quantum error correction as a special case. Moreover, we also give a sufficient and necessary condition of quantum error correction using this approach. We show that this approach provides more recovery operations than operator quantum error correction, which possibly leads to simpler decoding procedures.