In this article we address the computational hardness of optimally decoding a quantum stabilizer code. Much like classical linear codes, errors are detected by measuring certain check operators which yield an error syndrome, and the decoding problem consists of determining the most likely recovery given the syndrome. The corresponding classical problem is known to be NP-complete, and a similar decoding problem for quantum codes is also known to be NP-complete. However, this decoding strategy is not optimal in the quantum setting as it does not take into account error degeneracy, which causes distinct errors to have the same effect on the code. Here, we show that optimal decoding of stabilizer codes is computationally much harder than optimal decoding of classical linear codes, it is #P.
In this article we address the computational hardness of optimally decoding a quantum stabilizer code. Much like classical linear codes, errors are detected by measuring certain check operators which yield an error syndrome, and the decoding problem consists of determining the most likely recovery given the syndrome. The corresponding classical problem is known to be NP-complete, and a similar decoding problem for quantum codes is also known to be NP-complete. However, this decoding strategy is not optimal in the quantum setting as it does not take into account error degeneracy, which causes distinct errors to have the same effect on the code. Here, we show that optimal decoding of stabilizer codes is computationally much harder than optimal decoding of classical linear codes, it is #P.
In this paper, we address the computational hardness of optimally decoding a quantum stabilizer code. Much like classical linear codes, errors are detected by measuring certain check operators which yield an error syndrome, and the decoding problem consists of determining the most likely recovery given the syndrome. The corresponding classical problem is known to be NP-complete, and are appropriate a similar decoding problem for quantum codes is also known to be NP-complete. However, this decoding strategy is not optimal in the quantum setting as it does not consider error degeneracy, which causes distinct errors to have the same effect on the code. Here, we show that optimal decoding of stabilizer codes (previously known to be NP-hard) is in fact computationally much harder than optimal decoding of classical linear codes, it is #P-complete.
This thesis deals with the study of computational complexity of decoding stabilizer codes. The first three chapters contain all the necessary background to understand the main result of this thesis. First, we explain the necessary notions in computational complexity, introducing P, NP, #P classes of problems, along with some examples intended for physicists. Then, we explain the decoding problem in classical error correction, for linear codes on the binary symmetric channel and discuss the celebrated result of Mcleicee et al., in [1]. In the third chapter, we study the problem of quantum communication, over Pauli channels. Here, using the stabilizer formalism, we discuss the concept of degenerate errors. The decoding problem for stabilizer codes, which simply neglects the presence of degenerate errors, is called quantum maximum likelihood decoding (QMLD) and it was shown to be NP-complete, by Min Hseiu Heish et al., in [2]. We focus on the problem of optimal decoding, called degenerate quantum maximum likelihood decoding (DQMLD), which accounts for the presence of degenerate errors. We will highlight some instances of stabilizer codes, where the presence of degenerate errors causes drastic variations between the performances of DQMLD and QMLD. The main contribution of this thesis is to demonstrate that the optimal decoding problem for stabilizer codes is much harder than what the previous results had anticipated. In the last chapter, we present our own result (in Thm. 5.1.1), establishing that the optimal decoding problem for stabilizer codes, is #P-complete. To prove this, we demonstrate that the problem of evaluating the weight enumerator of a binary linear code, which is #P-complete, can be reduced (in polynomial time) to the DQMLD problem, see (Sec. 5.1). Our principal result is also presented as an article in [3], which is currently under review for publication in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. In addition to the main result, we also show that under certain conditions, the outputs of DQMLD and QMLD always agree. We consider the conditions developed by us to be an improvement over the ones in [4, 5].
We classify the complexity classes of several important decoding problems for quantum stabilizer codes. First, regardless of the channel model, quantum bounded distance decoding is shown to be NP-hard, like what Berlekamp, McEliece and Tilborg did for classical binary linear codes in 1978. Then under the depolarizing channel, the decoding problems for finding a most likely error and for minimizing the decoding error probability are also shown to be NP-hard. Our results indicate that finding a polynomial-time decoding algorithm for general stabilizer codes may not be possible, but this, on the other hand, strengthens the foundation of quantum code-based cryptography.
We classify the time complexities of three important decoding problems for quantum stabilizer codes. First, regardless of the channel model, quantum bounded distance decoding is shown to be NP-hard, like what Berlekamp, McEliece and Tilborg did for classical binary linear codes in 1978. Then over the depolarizing channel, the decoding problems for finding a most likely error and for minimizing the decoding error probability are also shown to be NP-hard. Our results indicate that finding a polynomial-time decoding algorithm for general stabilizer codes may be impossible, but this, on the other hand, strengthens the foundation of quantum code-based cryptography.
Mapping an error syndrome to the error operator is the core of quantum decoding network and is also the key step of recovery. The definitions of the bit-flip error syndrome matrix and the phase-flip error syndrome matrix were presented, and then the error syndromes of quantum errors were expressed in terms of the columns of the bit-flip error syndrome matrix and the phase-flip error syndrome matrix. It also showed that the error syndrome matrices of a stabilizer code are determined by its check matrix, which is similar to the classical case. So, the error-detection and recovery techniques of classical linear codes can be applied to quantum stabilizer codes after some modifications. Some necessary and/or sufficient conditions for the stabilizer code over GF(2) is degenerate or nondegenerate for Pauli channel based on the relationship between the error syndrome matrices and the check matrix was presented. A new way to find the minimum distance of the quantum stabilizer codes based on their check matrices was presented, and followed from which we proved that the performance of degenerate quantum code outperform (at least have the same performance) nondegenerate quantum code for Pauli channel.
Although the theory of quantum error correction is intimately related to classical coding theory and, in particular, one can construct quantum error-correction codes (QECCs) from classical codes with the dual-containing property, this does not necessarily imply that the computational complexity of decoding QECCs is the same as their classical counterparts. Instead, decoding QECCs can be very much different from decoding classical codes due to the degeneracy property. Intuitively, one expects degeneracy would simplify the decoding since two different errors might not and need not be distinguished in order to correct them. However, we show that general quantum decoding problem is NP-hard regardless of the quantum codes being degenerate or nondegenerate. This finding implies that no considerably fast decoding algorithm exists for the general quantum decoding problems and suggests the existence of a quantum cryptosystem based on the hardness of decoding QECCs.