For an abelian group H acting on the set [𝓁], an (H,𝓁)-lift of a graph G₀ is a graph obtained by replacing each vertex by 𝓁 copies, and each edge by a matching corresponding to the action of an element of H. Expanding graphs obtained via abelian lifts, form a key ingredient in the recent breakthrough constructions of quantum LDPC codes, (implicitly) in the fiber bundle codes by Hastings, Haah and O'Donnell [STOC 2021] achieving distance Ω̃(N^{3/5}), and in those by Panteleev and Kalachev [IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 2021] of distance Ω(N/log(N)). However, both these constructions are non-explicit. In particular, the latter relies on a randomized construction of expander graphs via abelian lifts by Agarwal et al. [SIAM J. Discrete Math 2019]. In this work, we show the following explicit constructions of expanders obtained via abelian lifts. For every (transitive) abelian group H ⩽ Sym(𝓁), constant degree d ≥ 3 and ε > 0, we construct explicit d-regular expander graphs G obtained from an (H,𝓁)-lift of a (suitable) base n-vertex expander G₀ with the following parameters: ii) λ(G) ≤ 2√{d-1} + ε, for any lift size 𝓁 ≤ 2^{n^{δ}} where δ = δ(d,ε), iii) λ(G) ≤ ε ⋅ d, for any lift size 𝓁 ≤ 2^{n^{δ₀}} for a fixed δ₀ > 0, when d ≥ d₀(ε), or iv) λ(G) ≤ Õ(√d), for lift size "exactly" 𝓁 = 2^{Θ(n)}. As corollaries, we obtain explicit quantum lifted product codes of Panteleev and Kalachev of almost linear distance (and also in a wide range of parameters) and explicit classical quasi-cyclic LDPC codes with wide range of circulant sizes. Items (i) and (ii) above are obtained by extending the techniques of Mohanty, O'Donnell and Paredes [STOC 2020] for 2-lifts to much larger abelian lift sizes (as a byproduct simplifying their construction). This is done by providing a new encoding of special walks arising in the trace power method, carefully "compressing" depth-first search traversals. Result (iii) is via a simpler proof of Agarwal et al. [SIAM J. Discrete Math 2019] at the expense of polylog factors in the expansion.
For an abelian group H acting on the set [𝓁], an (H,𝓁)-lift of a graph G₀ is a graph obtained by replacing each vertex by 𝓁 copies, and each edge by a matching corresponding to the action of an element of H. Expanding graphs obtained via abelian lifts, form a key ingredient in the recent breakthrough constructions of quantum LDPC codes, (implicitly) in the fiber bundle codes by Hastings, Haah and O'Donnell [STOC 2021] achieving distance Ω̃(N^{3/5}), and in those by Panteleev and Kalachev [IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 2021] of distance Ω(N/log(N)). However, both these constructions are non-explicit. In particular, the latter relies on a randomized construction of expander graphs via abelian lifts by Agarwal et al. [SIAM J. Discrete Math 2019]. In this work, we show the following explicit constructions of expanders obtained via abelian lifts. For every (transitive) abelian group H ⩽ Sym(𝓁), constant degree d ≥ 3 and ε > 0, we construct explicit d-regular expander graphs G obtained from an (H,𝓁)-lift of a (suitable) base n-vertex expander G₀ with the following parameters: ii) λ(G) ≤ 2√{d-1} + ε, for any lift size 𝓁 ≤ 2^{n^{δ}} where δ = δ(d,ε), iii) λ(G) ≤ ε ⋅ d, for any lift size 𝓁 ≤ 2^{n^{δ₀}} for a fixed δ₀ > 0, when d ≥ d₀(ε), or iv) λ(G) ≤ Õ(√d), for lift size "exactly" 𝓁 = 2^{Θ(n)}. As corollaries, we obtain explicit quantum lifted product codes of Panteleev and Kalachev of almost linear distance (and also in a wide range of parameters) and explicit classical quasi-cyclic LDPC codes with wide range of circulant sizes. Items (i) and (ii) above are obtained by extending the techniques of Mohanty, O'Donnell and Paredes [STOC 2020] for 2-lifts to much larger abelian lift sizes (as a byproduct simplifying their construction). This is done by providing a new encoding of special walks arising in the trace power method, carefully "compressing" depth-first search traversals. Result (iii) is via a simpler proof of Agarwal et al. [SIAM J. Discrete Math 2019] at the expense of polylog factors in the expansion.
The first linear-distance quantum LDPC codes were recently constructed by a line of breakthrough works (culminating in the result of Panteleev & Kalachev, 2021). All such constructions, even when allowing for almost-linear distance, are based on an operation called a balanced (or lifted) product, which is used in a one-shot manner to combine a pair of large classical codes possessing a group symmetry. We present a new construction of almost-linear distance quantum LDPC codes that is iterative in nature. Our construction is based on a more basic and widely used product, namely the homological product (i.e. the tensor product of chain complexes). Specifically, for every ε > 0, we obtain a family of [[N,N^{1-ε},N^{1-ε}]] (subsystem) quantum LDPC codes via repeated homological products of a constant-sized quantum locally testable code. Our key idea is to remove certain low-weight codewords using subsystem codes (while still maintaining constant stabilizer weight), in order to circumvent a particular obstruction that limited the distance of many prior homological product code constructions to at most Õ(√N).
In classical coding theory, the quest for explicit codes achieving list decoding capacity has been an important driving force. While random codes are easily shown to achieve capacity, an explicit construction was only discovered decades later in the seminal work [Guruswami and Rudra, STOC 2006]. In quantum coding theory, it is highly desirable that a code family be LDPC. While good quantum codes were known for decades, obtaining the additional LDPC property was elusive. In fact, only very recently that good quantum LDPC codes were discovered in a breakthrough work [Panteleev and Kalachev, STOC 2022].
In this context, a natural question is to ask for an explicit family of quantum codes achieving list decoding capacity while also possessing the important LDPC property. In this work, we provide (to the best of our knowledge) the first explicit constructions of quantum LDPC codes achieving list decoding capacity, namely, with a list decoding radius approaching the quantum Singleton bound with constant list sizes. Furthermore, we provide near-linear time (in the block-length) list decoding algorithms approaching capacity.
Our explicit code construction are based on expander graphs via the quantum analogue of Alon-Edmonds-Luby (AEL) amplification [Bergamaschi, Golowich and Gunn, STOC 2024], and this enables the important LDPC property. Our efficient list decoding algorithms are obtained by generalizing the classical expander-based weak-regularity list decoding algorithms [Srivastava and Tulsiani, FOCS 2025] [Jeronimo and Singh, 2025] to suitable instantiations of quantum AEL.
The first linear-distance quantum LDPC codes were recently constructed by a line of breakthrough works (culminating in the result of Panteleev & Kalachev, 2021). All such constructions, even when allowing for almost-linear distance, are based on an operation called a balanced (or lifted) product, which is used in a one-shot manner to combine a pair of large classical codes possessing a group symmetry. We present a new construction of almost-linear distance quantum LDPC codes that is iterative in nature. Our construction is based on a more basic and widely used product, namely the homological product (i.e. the tensor product of chain complexes). Specifically, for every ε > 0, we obtain a family of [[N,N^{1-ε},N^{1-ε}]] (subsystem) quantum LDPC codes via repeated homological products of a constant-sized quantum locally testable code. Our key idea is to remove certain low-weight codewords using subsystem codes (while still maintaining constant stabilizer weight), in order to circumvent a particular obstruction that limited the distance of many prior homological product code constructions to at most Õ(√N).
We present explicit constructions of quantum Tanner (QT) codes with good rate and distance, obtained through two complementary approaches: the left-right Cayley complex (LRCC) description and the "lifting" perspective, in which a seed Calderbank-Shor-Steane (CSS) code is lifted by commuting left-right regular actions of a finite group G. Through an extensive search over non-abelian groups from GAP's SmallGrp library, we investigate the moderate-blocklength regime (n∈[500,1000]) and identify several new code instances with distance upper bounds exceeding 20. These include [[480,8,(≤21,≤21)]], [[504,4,(≤36,≤27)]], [[672,4,(≤48,≤28)]], [[720,6,(≤30,≤30)]], and [[864,8,(≤39,≤31)]], with these bounds obtained using up to 350 million trials of sQetch, a randomized distance estimator. The code instances presented have check weights ranging from 9 to 20. Using the Tesseract decoder, we estimate pseudo-thresholds of 3.6%-4.6% under phenomenological noise and 0.14%-0.27% under circuit-level noise, comparable to prior results at shorter code lengths. We also provide QuantumExpanders.jl, an open-source Julia library for constructing QT codes and explicit constructions of Ramanujan graphs.
Quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes are an important component in the quest for quantum fault tolerance. Dramatic recent progress on qLDPC codes has led to constructions which are asymptotically good, and which admit linear-time decoders to correct errors affecting a constant fraction of codeword qubits. These constructions, while theoretically explicit, rely on inner codes with strong properties only shown to exist by probabilistic arguments, resulting in lengths that are too large to be practically relevant. In practice, the surface/toric codes, which are the product of two repetition codes, are still often the qLDPC codes of choice. A previous construction of qLDPC codes based on the lifted product of an expander-based classical LDPC code with a repetition code (Panteleev and Kalachev, 2020) achieved a near-linear distance, and avoids the need for such intractable inner codes. Our main result is an efficient decoding algorithm for these codes that corrects a near-linear number of adversarial errors. En route, we give a similar algorithm for the hypergraph product version these codes, which are simpler but have distance growing only as the square root of the block length. Our decoding algorithms leverage the fact that the codes we consider are quasi-cyclic, meaning that they respect a cyclic group symmetry. Since the repetition code is not based on expanders, previous approaches to decoding expander-based qLDPC codes, which typically worked by greedily flipping code bits to reduce some potential function, do not apply in our setting. Instead, we reduce our decoding problem (in a black-box manner) to that of decoding classical expander-based LDPC codes under noisy parity-check syndromes. For completeness, we also include a treatment of such classical noisy-syndrome decoding that is sufficient for our application to the quantum setting.
We introduce new families of quantum Tanner codes, a class of quantum codes that first appeared in the work of Leverrier and Zémor (FOCS 2022). These codes are built from two classical Tanner codes, for which the underlying graphs are extracted from coverings of 2D geometrical complexes, and the local linear codes are tensor-products of cyclic or double-circulant linear codes. The advantage of code lifting is that, for any lift of odd index t of an [[n,k,d]]-code, we can adapt the study of the transfer homomorphism arising in cellular homology to describe symmetries of its logical operators and to establish that its dimension is lower bounded by k, and its distance is upper bounded by t⋅d. Moreover, when the dimension of the lifted code is equal to k, its distance is lower bounded by d. These parameter bounds also apply to the previous methods of code lifting of Guémard (IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, 2025). Finally, We present several explicit families, and identify instances of moderate length quantum codes which are degenerate, have low check weight, and whose distance surpasses the square root of the code length. Among them, we report the existence of a [[96,2,12]]-code whose distance growth saturates our bound, and for which half of the checks are of weight 8 and the other half of weight 4.