Qubit code

Corrects erasure errors on up to \(d-1\) qubits. The number of correctable errors is often called the decoding radius, and it is upper bounded by half of the code distance. As a result, qubit codes cannot tolerate adversarial errors on more than \((1-R)/4\) registers.

A convenient and often considered error set is the Pauli error or Pauli string basis. For a single qubit, this set consists of products of powers of the Pauli matrices \begin{align} X=\begin{pmatrix}0 & 1\\ 1 & 0 \end{pmatrix}\,\,\text{ and }\,\,Z=\begin{pmatrix}1 & 0\\ 0 & -1 \end{pmatrix}~. \tag*{(1)}\end{align} For multiple qubits, error set elements are tensor products of elements of the single-qubit error set.

The Pauli error set is a unitary and Hermitian basis for linear operators on the multi-qubit Hilbert space that is orthonormal under the Hilbert-Schmidt inner product; it is a prototypical nice error basis [1][2][3]. The distance associated with this set is often the minimum weight of a Pauli string that implements a nontrivial logical operation in the code.

The minimum weight of a Pauli error that has a non-zero expectation value for some code basis state is called the diagonal distance [4]. Codes whose distance is greater than the diagonal distance are degenerate.