Minimal degenerate CSS quantum code with low cost circuit

Error correction is of utmost necessity for large-scale quantum computing. Quantum error correcting codes can be degenerate, if more than one type of error can map the input state to the same error state. In this paper, we propose a 6-qubit degenerate CSS code. We show that our proposed code can correct a single bit flip error, but arbitrarily many phase flip errors occurring on the codeword. Furthermore, it follows from a bound on CSS codes that the proposed code is the minimal binary CSS code which can encode a single qubit of information. We also perform a comparative study of the gate count required for a fault tolerant decomposition of the error correction circuit for the proposed code, with that for the existing 9-qubit, 7-qubit and 5-qubit binary QEC codes. Our results show, on an average over the different technologies a savings of 98.14% in the gate count for the proposed code over that for the 5-qubit code. Significant improvement of around 50% in gate count is also obtained when compared to those for the 9-qubit and 7-qubit codes.