This work deals with zero-error subspaces of quantum channels and their intimate connection with quantum and classical codes. We give operator algebraic characterizations of such subspaces and give some upper and lower bounds on their maximum dimension. Classical and quantum codes and (quantum) noiseless subsystems may be considered as special cases of zero-error subspaces. We explore several consequences of this fact.

The central issue in this paper is to transmit a quantum state in such a way that after some decoherence occurs, most of the information can be restored by a suitable decoding operation. For this purpose, we incorporate redundancy by mapping a given initial quantum state to a messenger state on a larger dimensional Hilbert space via a C* -algebra embedding. Our noise model for the transmission is a phase damping channel which admits a noiseless subsystem or decoherence-free subspace. More precisely, the transmission channel is obtained from convex combinations of a set of lowest rank yes/no measurements that leave a component of the messenger state unchanged. The objective of our encoding is to distribute quantum information optimally across the noise-susceptible component of the transmission when the noiseless component is not large enough to contain all the quantum information to be transmitted. We derive simple geometric conditions for optimal encoding and construct examples of such encodings.