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arXiv:1810.03681

Numerical study of hypergraph product codes

Antoine Grospellier, Anirudh Krishna

Published Oct 8, 2018• 19 citations
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Abstract

Hypergraph product codes introduced by Tillich and Zémor are a class of quantum LDPC codes with constant rate and distance scaling with the square-root of the block size. Quantum expander codes, a subclass of these codes, can be decoded using the linear time small-set-flip algorithm of Leverrier, Tillich and Zémor. In this paper, we numerically estimate the performance for the hypergraph product codes under independent bit and phase flip noise. We focus on two families of hypergraph product codes. The first family has rate $1/61 \sim 1.6\%$, has qubits of weight $10$ or $12$ and stabilizers of weight $11$. We report a threshold near $4.6\%$ for the small-set-flip decoder. We also show that for similar rate, the performance of the hypergraph product is better than the performance of the toric code as soon as we deal with more than $500$ logical qubits and that for $3600$ logical qubits, the logical error rate for the hypergraph product code is several orders of magnitude smaller. The second family has rate $0.2$, qubits of weight $10$ and $20$ and stabilizers of weight $15$. We report a threshold near $2\%$ for the small-set-flip decoder.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.1810.03681

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Finding good quantum low density parity check (LDPC) codes is an essential step for the design of efficient quantum fault-tolerant protocols. The hypergraph product construction [1] is a combinatorial way to build an LDPC CSS code with parameters [[n, Θ(n), Θ(√n)]] from a well chosen classical code. Moreover, the hypergraph product obtained from a classical expander code [2] can be used to perform fault-tolerant quantum computation with constant overhead in space and has the single-shot error correction property [3, 4]. Although these codes exhibit good features asymptotically, it is unknown whether they are suitable for small block lengths [5, 6, 7]. In this work, we take steps towards addressing this problem. Our motivations stem from classical coding theory. Sipser and Spielman discovered a linear time decoder for classical expander codes [2]. This inspired the quantum decoding algorithm small-set-flip introduced in [8]. The bit-flip algorithm, however, is never used in practice because it is outperformed by message passing algorithms such as belief propagation. Naively generalizing belief propagation to the quantum LDPC codes is ineffective due to degeneracy [9, 10, 11]. In particular, the belief propagation decoder does not perform well on hypergraph product codes [7]. In this work, we show that running the BP algorithm followed by the small-set-flip decoder significantly improves the decoding threshold and the finite-length behavior. In [5] it has been shown that an exponential time decoder achieves a threshold near 7% and [6] shows that the small-set-flip algorithm has a threshold near 4.5%. This work shows that combining the belief propagation and the small-set-flip decoder, leads to a threshold above 7% for hypergraph product codes with rate 4% constructed from (3, 4)-regular codes. In addition, running the small-set-flip decoder alone requires quantum codes with generators of weight at least 11 [6] whereas combining the two decoders allows us to use codes with generators of weight 7. Reducing the generators weight improves the running time of the decoder and is required to perform the corresponding quantum measurements on real devices.
Hypergraph product codes are a class of constant-rate quantum low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes equipped with a linear-time decoder called small-set-flip (SSF). This decoder displays sub-optimal performance in practice and requires very large error correcting codes to be effective. In this work, we present new hybrid decoders that combine the belief propagation (BP) algorithm with the SSF decoder. We present the results of numerical simulations when codes are subject to independent bit-flip and phase-flip errors. We provide evidence that the threshold of these codes is roughly 7.5% assuming an ideal syndrome extraction, and remains close to 3% in the presence of syndrome noise. This result subsumes and significantly improves upon an earlier work by Grospellier and Krishna (arXiv:1810.03681). The low-complexity high-performance of these heuristic decoders suggests that decoding should not be a substantial difficulty when moving from zero-rate surface codes to constant-rate LDPC codes and gives a further hint that such codes are well-worth investigating in the context of building large universal quantum computers.
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For a quantum error correcting code to be used in practice, it needs to be equipped with an efficient decoding algorithm, which identifies corrections given the observed syndrome of errors.Hypergraph product codes are a promising family of constant-rate quantum LDPC codes that have a linear-time decoding algorithm called Small-Set-Flip (SSF\texttt{SSF}SSF) (Leverrier, Tillich, Zémor FOCS 2015). The algorithm proceeds by iteratively applying small corrections which reduce the syndrome weight. Together, these small corrections can provably correct large errors for sufficiently large codes with sufficiently large (but constant) stabilizer weight. However, this guarantee does not hold for small codes with low stabilizer weight. In this case, SSF\texttt{SSF}SSF can terminate with stopping failures, meaning it encounters an error for which it is unable to identify a small correction. We find that the structure of errors that cause stopping failures have a simple form for sufficiently small qubit failure rates. We propose a new decoding algorithm called the Projection-Along-a-Line (PAL\texttt{PAL}PAL) decoder to supplement SSF\texttt{SSF}SSF after stopping failures. Using SSF+PAL\texttt{SSF}+\texttt{PAL}SSF+PAL as a combined decoder, we find an order-of-magnitude improvement in the logical error rate.
We suggest several techniques to improve the toric codes and the finite-rate generalized toric codes (quantum hypergraph-product codes) recently introduced by Tillich and Zémor. For the usual toric codes, we introduce the rotated lattices specified by two integer-valued periodicity vectors. These codes include the checkerboard codes, and the family of minimal single-qubit-encoding toric codes with block length n = t2+ (t+1)2and distance d = 2t + 1, t = 1, 2, ... We also suggest several related algebraic constructions which increase the rate of the existing hypergraph-product codes by up to four times.
We introduce an ansatz for quantum codes which gives the hypergraph-product (generalized toric) codes by Tillich and Z\'emor and generalized bicycle codes by MacKay et al. as limiting cases. The construction allows for both the lower and the upper bounds on the minimum distance; they scale as a square root of the block length. Many thus defined codes have a finite rate and limited-weight stabilizer generators, an analog of classical low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. Compared to the hypergraph-product codes, hyperbicycle codes generally have a wider range of parameters; in particular, they can have a higher rate while preserving the estimated error threshold.