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arXiv:1010.3282

Topological approach toward quantum codes with realistic physical constraints

Beni Yoshida

Published Oct 15, 2010• 0 citations
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Abstract

The following open problems, which concern a fundamental limit on coding properties of quantum codes with realistic physical constraints, are analyzed and partially answered here: (a) the upper bound on code distances of quantum error-correcting codes with geometrically local generators, (b) the feasibility of a self-correcting quantum memory. To investigate these problems, we study stabilizer codes supported by local interaction terms with translation and scale symmetries on a $D$-dimensional lattice. Our analysis uses the notion of topology emerging in geometric shapes of logical operators, which sheds a surprising new light on theory of quantum codes with physical constraints.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.1010.3282

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•Jan 1, 2019•0 citations
The following open problems, which concern a fundamental limit on coding properties of quantum codes with realistic physical constraints, are analyzed and partially answered here: (a) the upper bound on code distances of quantum error-correcting codes with geometrically local generators, (b) the feasibility of a self-correcting quantum memory. To investigate these problems, we study stabilizer codes supported by local interaction terms with translation and scale symmetries on a DDD-dimensional lattice. Our analysis uses the notion of topology emerging in geometric shapes of logical operators, which sheds a surprising new light on theory of quantum codes with physical constraints.
Quantum error-correcting codes are a cornerstone of quantum computing, with broad and profound connections to physics and mathematics. In this work, we introduce the notion of intrinsic locality dimension of stabilizer codes, which is independent of the underlying geometry of quantum codes and naturally extends to non-integer values. Drawing on mathematical tools from fractal geometry and geometric measure theory, the intrinsic locality dimension accommodates flexible architectures and provides a quantitative measure of code connectivity, encompassing both topological codes and algebraic constructions such as bivariate-bicycle-type codes. We show how the intrinsic dimension serves as a fundamental organizing parameter that unifies code properties. In particular, we prove general limitations on code parameters and compatible fault-tolerant logical gates induced by the intrinsic dimension, generalizing the Bravyi--Poulin--Terhal and Bravyi--König bounds for regular topological codes, respectively. Furthermore, we consider implications on thermal properties: toward fully characterizing the geometry requirement for self-correcting quantum memories (SCQMs), we present a conditional no-go result for SCQMs in dimension 3−ε3-ε3−ε and take stock of existing results on low-dimensional SCQMs. Our theory provides a unifying mathematical framework for understanding the fundamental capabilities and geometric implementations of quantum error correction and fault tolerance.
We study the fundamental limits on the reliable storage of quantum information in lattices of qubits by deriving tradeoff bounds for approximate quantum error correcting codes. We introduce a notion of local approximate correctability and code distance, and give a number of equivalent formulations thereof, generalizing various exact error-correction criteria. Our tradeoff bounds relate the number of physical qubits n , the number of encoded qubits k , the code distance d , the accuracy parameter δ that quantifies how well the erasure channel can be reversed, and the locality parameter ℓ that specifies the length scale at which the recovery operation can be done. In a regime where the recovery is successful to accuracy δ that is exponentially small in ℓ , which is the case for perturbations of local commuting projector codes, our bound reads kd2D−1≤O(n(log⁡n)2DD−1) for codes on D -dimensional lattices of Euclidean metric. We also find that the code distance of any local approximate code cannot exceed O(ℓn(D−1)/D) if δ≤O(ℓn−1/D) . As a corollary of our formulation of correctability in terms of logical operator avoidance, we show that the code distance d and the size d~ of a minimal region that can support all approximate logical operators satisfies d~d1D−1≤O(nℓDD−1) , where the logical operators are accurate up to O((nδ/d)1/2) in operator norm. Finally, we prove that for two-dimensional systems if logical operators can be approximated by operators supported on constant-width flexible strings, then the dimension of the code space must be bounded. This supports one of the assumptions of algebraic anyon theories, that there exist only finitely many anyon types.
We study the structure of logical operators in local DDD-dimensional quantum codes, considering both subsystem codes with geometrically local gauge generators and codes defined by geometrically local commuting projectors. We show that if the code distance is ddd, then any logical operator can be supported on a set of specified geometry containing $\stackrel{\ifmmode \tilde{}\else \~{}\fi{}}{d}$ qubits, where $\stackrel{\ifmmode \tilde{}\else \~{}\fi{}}{d}{d}^{1/(D\ensuremath{-}1)}=O(n)$ and nnn is the code length. Our results place limitations on partially self-correcting quantum memories, in which at least some logical operators are protected by energy barriers that grow with system size. We also show that for any two-dimensional local commuting projector code there is a nontrivial logical ``string'' operator supported on a narrow strip, where the operator is only slightly entangling across any cut through the strip.
Deciding if a given family of quantum states is topologically ordered is an important but nontrivial problem in condensed matter physics and quantum information theory. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions for a family of graph states to be in TQO-1, which is a class of quantum error-correction code states whose code distance scales macroscopically with the number of physical qubits. Using these criteria, we consider a number of specific graph families, including the star and complete graphs, and the line graphs of complete and completely bipartite graphs, and discuss which are topologically ordered and how to construct the codewords. The formalism is then employed to construct several codes with macroscopic distance, including a three-dimensional topological code generated by local stabilizers that also has a macroscopic number of encoded logical qubits. The results indicate that graph states provide a fruitful approach to the construction and characterization of topological stabilizer quantum error-correction codes.
We construct the first fully spatially local fault-tolerant quantum computer based on topological codes in fewer than four spatial dimensions. Our construction is a two-dimensional architecture that uses only geometrically local quantum and classical operations, bounded-speed classical communication and computation, and a constant density of quantum and classical resources. The core component is a new time-translation-invariant cellular-automaton decoder for the surface code. This decoder preserves logical information for a time stretched-exponential in the code distance and operates continuously during state injection, stabilizer-state preparation, lattice surgery, and transversal readout. We also prove that every translation-invariant topological Pauli stabilizer code is locally decodable under phenomenological noise.
The employment of quantum error correction codes (QECCs) within quantum computers potentially offers a reliability improvement for both quantum computation and communications tasks. However, the laws of quantum mechanics prevent us from directly invoking the mature family of classical error correction codes in the quantum domain. In order to circumvent the associated problems, the notion of quantum stabilizer codes (QSCs) was proposed in conjunction with syndrome-based decoding in the quantum regime. However, most of the powerful QSC schemes require long codewords for achieving a high performance, which potentially imposes additional challenges for implementation concerning their implementation, since their decoding may require longer than the quantum circuit's coherence time. Hence at the time of writing, QSCs exhibiting short to moderate codeword lengths are preferable. We commence by describing the pivotal problem encountered by classical error-correction codes, which also emerges when designing the QSCs, namely the intrinsic trade-off between the minimum distance versus coding rate. The complete formulation of this particular trade-off does not exist, but several lower and upper bounds can be found in the literature. It has been shown that a substantial gap can be observed between the upper and lower bound of the minimum distance, given the codeword length and the quantum coding rate. Hence, we propose an appealingly simple and invertible analytical approximation, for characterizing the trade-off between the quantum coding rate and the minimum distance of QSCs as well as their corresponding quantum bit error rate (QBER) performance upper-bound. For example, for a half-rate QSC having a codeword length of n = 128, the minimum distance is bounded by 11 < d < 22, while our approximation yields a minimum distance of d = 17 for the above-mentioned code. Next, we link this parametric study of the minimum distance versus quantum coding rate to the popular QSCs, namely to the family of quantum topological error correction codes (QTECCs). In order to construct the classical-to-quantum isomorphism, we conceive and investigate the family of classical topological error correction codes (TECCs), assuming that the bits of a codeword can be arranged in a lattice structure. We then present the classical-to-quantum isomorphism to pave the way for constructing their dual pairs in the quantum domain, which are the QTECCs. Finally, we characterize the performance of QTECCs in the face of the quantum depolarizing channel in terms of both their QBER and fidelity. Specifically, we demonstrate that for quantum coding rate rQ ~ 0, the threshold probability of the QBER below which the colour, rotated-surface, surface, and toric codes become capable of improving the uncoded QBER are given by 1.8 ×10-2, 1.3 ×10-2, 6.3 ×10-2 and 6.8 ×10-2, respectively. Furthermore, we also demonstrate that we can achieve beneficial fidelity improvements above the minimum fidelity of 0.94, 0.97 and 0.99 by employing the rQ = 1/7 colour code, the rQ = 1/9 rotated-surface code, and the rQ = 1/13 surface code, respectively. However, QSCs require additional quantum gates for their employment. Incorporating more quantum gates for performing error correction potentially introduces further sources of quantum decoherence into quantum computers. In this scenario, the primary challenge is to find the sufficient condition required by each of the quantum gates for beneficially employing QECCs in order to yield reliability improvements, given that the quantum gates utilized by the QECCs also introduce quantum decoherence. In this treatise, we approach this problem by firstly presenting the general framework of protecting quantum gates by the amalgamation of the transversal configuration of quantum gates and QSCs, which can be viewed as syndrome-based QECCs. Secondly, we provide examples of the advocated framework by invoking QTECCs for protecting both transversal Hadamard gates and controlled (CNOT) gates. Both our simulation and analytical results explicitly show that by utilizing QTECCs, the fidelity of the quantum gates can be beneficially improved, provided that quantum gates satisfying a certain minimum depolarization fidelity threshold (Fth) are available. For instance, for protecting transversal Hadamard gates, the minimum fidelity values required for each of the gates in order to attain fidelity improvements are 99.74%, 99.73%, 99.87%, and 99.86%, when they are protected by colour, rotated-surface, surface, and toric codes, respectively. Unfortunately, these specific Fth values can only be obtained for a very large number of physical qubits (n → ∞), when the quantum coding rate of the QTECCs approaches zero (rQ → 0). Finally, in order to conceive QSCs exhibiting a high quantum coding rate, we modify the construction of QTECCs for conceiving a low-complexity concatenated quantum turbocode (QTC). The above-mentioned high quantum coding rate is obtained by combining the quantum-domain version of short-block codes (SBCs) also known as single parity-check (SPC) codes as the outer codes and quantum unity-rate codes (QURCs) as the inner codes. Despite its design simplicity, the proposed QTC yields a near-hashing-bound error correction performance. For instance, compared to the best half-rate QTC known in the literature, namely the quantum irregular convolutional codes (QIrCCs) combined with the QURC scheme, which operates at the distance of D = 0.037 from the quantum hashing bound, our novel QSBC-QURC scheme can operate at the lower distance of D = 0:029. It is also worth mentioning that this is the first instantiation of QTCs capable of adjusting the quantum encoders according to the quantum coding rate required for mitigating the Pauli errors imposed by the time-variant depolarizing probabilities of the quantum channel.