In this paper we investigate stabilizer quantum error correction codes using controlled phase rotations of strong coherent probe states. We explicitly describe two methods to measure the Pauli operators that generate the stabilizer group of a quantum code. First, we show how to measure a Pauli operator acting on physical qubits using a single coherent state with large average photon number, displacement operations, and photon detection. Second, we show how to measure the stabilizer operators fault-tolerantly by the deterministic preparation of coherent quantum superposition (“cat”) states along with one-bit teleportations between a qubitlike encoding of coherent states and physical qubits.

• Received 24 December 2006

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.76.012303