Error Correction Properties of Covariant Bosonic Encodings

Bosonic codes offer a promising approach towards hardware-efficient fault tolerance, with many leading examples such as the cat-code and the GKP code organized by an underlying symmetry. We build on a representation-theoretic framework of quantum error correction to formalize the construction and analysis of multimode symmetric bosonic codes, focusing on finite groups. Here, a physical, logical representation and an initial seed state together define the codewords via a covariant encoding. A central observation is that QEC matrices can be viewed as morphisms of group representations, so that Schur's lemma forces entire irreducible representations blocks to vanish. We recover several known single- and two-mode bosonic codes and build and analyze the error protection capabilities of three codes based on finite subgroups of SU(2). We analyze the impact of reducibility of the logical representation and optimize the seed state using the near-optimal fidelity.

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Authors

Frederic St-Amand; Jean-Philippe Burelle; Baptiste Royer

Published

Sep 22, 2026

Paper type

preprint

Source

Arxiv