Motivated by the close relationship between quantum error-correction, topological order, the holographic AdS/CFT duality, and tensor networks, we initiate the study of approximate quantum error-detecting codes in matrix product states (MPS). We first show that using open-boundary MPS to define boundary to bulk encoding maps yields at most constant distance error-detecting codes. These are degenerate ground spaces of gapped local Hamiltonians. To get around this no-go result, we consider excited states, i.e., we use the excitation ansatz to construct encoding maps: these yield error-detecting codes with distance Ω(n 1−ν ) for any ν ∈ (0, 1) and Ω(log n) encoded qubits. This shows that gapped systems contain -within isolated energy bands -error-detecting codes spanned by momentum eigenstates. We also consider the gapless Heisenberg-XXX model, whose energy eigenstates can be described via Bethe ansatz tensor networks. We show that it contains -within its low-energy eigenspace -an error-detecting code with the same parameter scaling. All these codes detect arbitrary d-local (not necessarily geometrically local) errors even though they are not permutation-invariant. This suggests that a wide range of naturally occurring many-body systems possess intrinsic errordetecting features.

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A programmable quantum processor uses the states of a program register to specify one element of a set of quantum channels which is applied to an input register. It is well-known that such a device is impossible with a finite-dimensional program register for any set that contains infinitely many unitary quantum channels (Nielsen and Chuang's No-Programming Theorem), meaning that a universal programmable quantum processor does not exist. The situation changes if the system has symmetries. Indeed, here we consider group-covariant channels. If the group acts irreducibly on the channel input, these channels can be implemented exactly by a programmable quantum processor with finite program dimension (via teleportation simulation, which uses the Choi-Jamiolkowski state of the channel as a program). Moreover, by leveraging the representation theory of the symmetry group action, we show how to remove redundancy in the program and prove that the resulting program register has minimum Hilbert space dimension. Furthermore, we provide upper and lower bounds on the program register dimension of a processor implementing all group-covariant channels approximately.