Physics Commons^™

Information-Preserving Structures: A General Framework For Quantum Zero-Error Information, Robin Blume-Kohout, Hui Khoon Ng, David Poulin, Lorenza Viola

Dartmouth Scholarship

Quantum systems carry information. Quantum theory supports at least two distinct kinds of information (classical and quantum), and a variety of different ways to encode and preserve information in physical systems. A system’s ability to carry information is constrained and defined by the noise in its dynamics. This paper introduces an operational framework, using information-preserving structures, to classify all the kinds of information that can be perfectly (i.e., with zero error) preserved by quantum dynamics. We prove that every perfectly preserved code has the same structure as a matrix algebra, and that preserved information can always be corrected. We …