Nonbinary Stabilizer Codes Over Finite Fields

One formidable difficulty in quantum communication and computation is to protect information-carrying quantum states against undesired interactions with the environment. To address this difficulty, many good quantum error-correcting codes have been derived as binary stabilizer codes. Fault-tolerant quantum computation prompted the study of nonbinary quantum codes, but the theory of such codes is not as advanced as that of binary quantum codes. This paper describes the basic theory of stabilizer codes over finite fields. The relation between stabilizer codes and general quantum codes is clarified by introducing a Galois theory for these objects. A characterization of nonbinary stabilizer codes over $bf F_q$ in…