Quantum error mitigation for rotation symmetric bosonic codes with symmetry expansion

The rotation symmetric bosonic code (RSBC) is a unified framework of practical bosonic codes that have rotation symmetries, such as cat codes and binomial codes. While cat codes achieve the break-even point in which the coherence time of the encoded qubits exceeds that of unencoded qubits, with binomial codes nearly approaching that point, the state preparation fidelity needs to be still improved for practical quantum computing. Concerning this problem, we investigate the framework of symmetry expansion, a class of quantum error mitigation that virtually projects the state onto the noise-free symmetric subspace by exploiting the system's intrinsic symmetries and post-processing of measurement outcomes. Although symmetry expansion has been limited to error mitigation of quantum states immediately before measurement, we successfully generalize symmetry expansion for state preparation. To implement our method, we use an ancilla qubit and only two controlled-rotation gates via dispersive interactions between the bosonic code states and the ancilla qubit. Interestingly, this method also allows us to virtually prepare the RSBC states only from easy-to-prepare states, e.g., coherent states. We also discuss that the conventional symmetry expansion protocol can be applied to improve the computation fidelity when the symmetries of rotation bosonic codes are unavailable due to low measurement fidelity. By giving comprehensive analytical and numerical arguments regarding the trace distance between the error-mitigated state and the ideal state and the sampling cost of quantum error mitigation, we show that symmetry expansion dramatically suppresses the effect of photon loss. Our novel error mitigation method will significantly enhance computation accuracy in the near-term bosonic quantum computing paradigm.