Hierarchical Generation and Design of Tree-Codes for Resource-Efficient Loss-Tolerant Quantum Communications

We develop protocols for generating loss-tolerant quantum tree-codes; these are designed to safeguard information against qubit losses, with wide applications in quantum communications. Contrary to previous proposals, our method enables top-to-bottom fast encoding and decoding, thereby reducing losses due to the lagging and photon-reordering at the repeater stations. At the hardware level, we show how to achieve this with a single quantum emitter equipped with a static feedback mechanism, which we leverage to engineer entangling gates between a fed-back qubit and multiple emitted qubits in parallel. In addition, analyzing typical patterns within the error-correction decoding graphs, we find optimizations of the structure of tree-codes, which enable improved performance by also reducing the code size; these are based on the introduction of asymmetries in the code, which mimic the intrinsic adaptiveness of the recovery procedure. We show numerically that these improvements together significantly enhance the loss-correction performance. Specifically, focusing on quantum repeater protocols, we show that our fast recovery scheme (decoding-encoding) allows for improved repeater rates with smaller photon numbers per code.