Quantum spherical codes

We introduce a framework for constructing quantum codes defined on spheres by recasting such codes as quantum analogues of the classical spherical codes. We apply this framework to bosonic coding, obtaining multimode extensions of the cat codes that can outperform previous constructions while requiring a similar type of overhead. Our polytope-based cat codes consist of sets of points with large separation that at the same time form averaging sets known as spherical designs. We also recast concatenations of CSS codes with cat codes as quantum spherical codes, revealing a new way to autonomously protect against dephasing noise.