  A significant obstacle for practical quantum computation is the loss of
physical qubits in quantum computers, a decoherence mechanism most notably in
optical systems. Here we experimentally demonstrate, both in the quantum
circuit model and in the one-way quantum computer model, the smallest
non-trivial quantum codes to tackle this problem. In the experiment, we encode
single-qubit input states into highly-entangled multiparticle codewords, and we
test their ability to protect encoded quantum information from detected
one-qubit loss error. Our results prove the in-principle feasibility of
overcoming the qubit loss error by quantum codes.
