Scalable protocol for identification of correctable codes

The task of finding a correctable encoding that protects against some physical quantum process is in general hard. Two main obstacles are that an exponential number of experiments are needed to gain complete information about the quantum process, and known algorithmic methods for finding correctable encodings involve operations on exponentially large matrices. However, we show that in some cases it is possible to find such encodings with only partial information about the quantum process. Such useful partial information can be systematically extracted by averaging the channel under the action of a set of unitaries in a process known as twirling. In this paper we prove that correctable encodings for a twirled channel are also correctable for the original channel. We investigate the particular case of twirling over the set of Pauli operators and qubit permutations, and show that the resulting quantum operation can be characterized experimentally in a scalable manner. We also provide a postprocessing scheme for finding unitarily correctable codes for these twirled channels which does not involve exponentially large matrices, and which is robust against uncertainties in the experimental estimates.