Characterization of quantum dynamics using quantum error correction

Characterizing noisy quantum processes is important to quantum computation and communication (QCC), since quantum systems are generally open. To date, all methods of characterization of quantum dynamics (CQD), typically implemented by quantum process tomography, are off-line, i.e., QCC and CQD are not concurrent, as they require distinct state preparations. Here we introduce a method, "quantum error correction based characterization of dynamics," in which the initial state is any element from the code space of a quantum error correcting code that can protect the state from arbitrary errors acting on the subsytem subjected to unknown dynamics. The statistics of stabilizer measurements, with possible unitary preprocessing operations, are used to characterize the noise, while the observed syndrome can be used to correct the noisy state. Our method requires at most 2(4n-1) configurations to characterize arbitrary noise acting on n qubits.