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arXiv:2004.07935 · SIAM Journal on Computing

Decodable Quantum LDPC Codes beyond the $\sqrt{n}$ Distance Barrier Using High-Dimensional Expanders

Shai Evra, Tali Kaufman, Gilles Zémor

Published Jun 14, 2022• 29 citations
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Abstract

Constructing quantum low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes with a minimum distance that grows faster than a square root of the length has been a major challenge of the field. With this challenge in mind, we investigate constructions that come from high-dimensional expanders, in particular Ramanujan complexes. These naturally give rise to very unbalanced quantum error correcting codes that have a large $X$-distance but a much smaller $Z$-distance. However, together with a classical expander LDPC code and a tensoring method that generalizes a construction of Hastings and also the Tillich–Zémor construction of quantum codes, we obtain quantum LDPC codes whose minimum distance exceeds the square root of the code length and whose dimension comes close to a square root of the code length. When the ingredient is a 2-dimensional Ramanujan complex, or the 2-skeleton of a 3-dimensional Ramanujan complex, we obtain a quantum LDPC code of minimum distance $n^{1/2}\log^{1/2}n$. We then exploit the expansion properties of the complex to devise the first polynomial-time algorithm that decodes above the square root barrier for quantum LDPC codes. Using a 3-dimensional Ramanujan complex, we also obtain an overall quantum code of minimum distance $n^{1/2}\log n$, which sets a new record for quantum LDPC codes.

DOI
10.1137/20m1383689

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Constructing quantum low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes with a minimum distance that grows faster than a square root of the length has been a major challenge of the field. With this challenge in mind, we investigate constructions that come from high-dimensional expanders, in particular Ramanujan complexes. These naturally give rise to very unbalanced quantum error correcting codes that have a large XXX-distance but a much smaller ZZZ-distance. However, together with a classical expander LDPC code and a tensoring method that generalizes a construction of Hastings and also the Tillich–Zémor construction of quantum codes, we obtain quantum LDPC codes whose minimum distance exceeds the square root of the code length and whose dimension comes close to a square root of the code length. When the ingredient is a 2-dimensional Ramanujan complex, or the 2-skeleton of a 3-dimensional Ramanujan complex, we obtain a quantum LDPC code of minimum distance n1/2log⁡1/2nn^{1/2}\log^{1/2}nn1/2log1/2n. We then exploit the expansion properties of the complex to devise the first polynomial-time algorithm that decodes above the square root barrier for quantum LDPC codes. Using a 3-dimensional Ramanujan complex, we also obtain an overall quantum code of minimum distance n1/2log⁡nn^{1/2}\log nn1/2logn, which sets a new record for quantum LDPC codes.
Constructing quantum LDPC codes with a minimum distance that grows faster than a square root of the length has been a major challenge of the field. With this challenge in mind, we investigate constructions that come from high-dimensional expanders, in particular Ramanujan complexes. These naturally give rise to very unbalanced quantum error correcting codes that have a large X-distance but a much smaller Z-distance. However, together with a classical expander LDPC code and a tensoring method that generalises a construction of Hastings and also the Tillich-Zemor construction of quantum codes, we obtain quantum LDPC codes whose minimum distance exceeds the square root of the code length and whose dimension comes close to a square root of the code length. When the ingredient is a 3-dimensional Ramanujan complex, we show that its 2-systole behaves like a square of the log of the complex size, which results in an overall quantum code of minimum distance n1/2logn, and sets a new record for quantum LDPC codes. When we use a 2-dimensional Ramanujan complex, or the 2-skeleton of a 3-dimensional Ramanujan complex, we obtain a quantum LDPC code of minimum distance n1/2log1/2n. We then exploit the expansion properties of the complex to devise the first polynomial time algorithm that decodes above the square root barrier for quantum LDPC codes.
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New Cosystolic Expanders from Tensors Imply Explicit Quantum LDPC Codes with Ω(nlog⁡kn)Ω(\sqrt{n}\log^kn)Ω(n​logkn) Distance
In this work we introduce a new notion of expansion in higher dimensions that is stronger than the well studied cosystolic expansion notion, and is termed {\em Collective-cosystolic expansion}. We show that tensoring two cosystolic expanders yields a new cosystolic expander, assuming one of the complexes in the product, is not only cosystolic expander, but rather a collective cosystolic expander. We then show that the well known bounded degree cosystolic expanders, the Ramanujan complexes are, in fact, collective cosystolic expanders. This enables us to construct new bounded degree cosystolic expanders, by tensoring of Ramanujan complexes. Using our new constructed bounded degree cosystolic expanders we construct {\em explicit} quantum LDPC codes of distance nlog⁡kn\sqrt{n} \log^k nn​logkn for any kkk, improving a recent result of Evra et. al. \cite{EKZ}, and setting a new record for distance of explicit quantum LDPC codes. The work of \cite{EKZ} took advantage of the high dimensional expansion notion known as cosystolic expansion, that occurs in Ramanujan complexes. Our improvement is achieved by considering tensor product of Ramanujan complexes, and using their newly derived property, the collective cosystolic expansion.
Quantum LDPC codes with Ω(nlog⁡kn)Ω(\sqrt{n}\log^kn)Ω(n​logkn) distance, for any kkk
In this work we construct quantum LDPC codes of distance nlog⁡kn\sqrt{n} \log^k nn​logkn for any kkk, improving a recent result of Evra et. al. \cite{EKZ}. The work of \cite{EKZ} took advantage of the high dimensional expansion notion known as cosystolic expansion, that occurs in Ramanujan complexes. Our improvement is achieved by considering tensor product of Ramanujan complexes. The main conceptual contribution of our work is the following: a tensor product of a cosystolic expander with a complex with a linear cosystole has a linear cosystole.
Quantum Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) codes provide a promising solution to protect quantum information from errors and are therefore considered an important step in the realisation of a fullscale fault-tolerant quantum computer. In this thesis, we study quantum LDPC codes under three different approaches, providing insights into renormalisation decoding for Kitaev’s toric code, establishing bounds on the minimum distance of geometrically-local codes, and constructing small instances of quantum Tanner codes. Kitaev’s toric code is a prominent quantum LDPC code that is currently the most widely pursued for experimental implementation. We focus on the probabilistic renormalisation decoders introduced by Duclos- Cianci and Poulin, a family of decoders that exhibit one of the best trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency. We study how they handle adversarial errors by introducing a deterministic renormalisation decoder that does not use a priori probabilities of the error model. We find that this renormalisation decoder allows for fractal-like uncorrectable error patterns, and we obtain a lower bound on the weight of such errors. Due to physical constraints, a lot of attention has gone into quantum LDPC codes whose stabilisers act only on a limited number of nearby qubits. We extend the well-known Bravyi-Terhal bound to quantum codes defined by local constraints on a lattice quotient, providing a crucial insight into the limitations of geometrically-local stabiliser codes. As an application, we provide upper bounds on the minimum distance of Abelian Two-Block Group Algebra codes, a family of quantum LDPC codes for which the minimum distance is currently unknown. In recent years, asymptotically good quantum LDPC codes were constructed, but provable results on their minimum distances only apply to impractically long codes. Following the effort in the design of near-term implementable codes, we construct short instances of quantum Tanner codes using square complexes obtained from lifted products of regular graphs. Several explicit instances of these codes exhibit minimum distances surpassing the square root of the code length.
We present an efficient decoding algorithm for constant rate quantum hyper graph-product LDPC codes which provably corrects adversarial errors of weight proportional to the code minimum distance, or equivalently to the square-root of the block length. The algorithm runs in time linear in the number of qubits, which makes its performance the strongest to date for linear-time decoding of quantum codes. The algorithm relies on expanding properties, not of the quantum code's factor graph directly, but of the factor graph of the original classical code it is constructed from.