Quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes are quantum stabilizer codes where each stabilizer acts on a constant number of qubits and each qubit is acted on by a constant number of stabilizers. We study qLDPC codes constructed from balanced products and lossless expanders. We found that assuming the existence of 2-sided lossless expander graphs with free group action, the resulting qLDPC codes have constant rate, linear distance, and linear time decoders.
Quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes are quantum stabilizer codes where each stabilizer acts on a constant number of qubits and each qubit is acted on by a constant number of stabilizers. We study qLDPC codes constructed from balanced products and lossless expanders. We found that assuming the existence of 2-sided lossless expander graphs with free group action, the resulting qLDPC codes have constant rate, linear distance, and linear time decoders.
Recent developments have shown the existence of quantum low-density parity check (qLDPC) codes with constant rate and linear distance. A natural question concerns the efficient decodability of these codes. In this paper, we present a linear time decoder for the recent quantum Tanner codes construction of asymptotically good qLDPC codes, which can correct all errors of weight up to a constant fraction of the blocklength. Our decoder is an iterative algorithm which searches for corrections within constant-sized regions. At each step, the corrections are found by reducing a locally defined and efficiently computable cost function which serves as a proxy for the weight of the remaining error.
We give a construction of Quantum Low-Density Parity Check (QLDPC) codes with near-optimal rate-distance tradeoff and efficient list decoding up to the Johnson bound in polynomial time. Previous constructions of list decodable good distance quantum codes either required access to a classical side channel or were based on algebraic constructions that preclude the LDPC property. Our construction relies on new algorithmic results for codes obtained via the quantum analog of the distance amplification scheme of Alon, Edmonds, and Luby [FOCS 1995]. These results are based on convex relaxations obtained using the Sum-of-Squares hierarchy, which reduce the problem of list decoding the distance amplified codes to unique decoding the starting base codes. Choosing these base codes to be the recent breakthrough constructions of good QLDPC codes with efficient unique decoders, we get efficiently list decodable QLDPC codes.
Quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes can be implemented by measuring only low-weight checks, making them compatible with noisy quantum hardware and central to the quest to build noise-resilient quantum computers. A fundamental open question is how constraints on check weight limit the achievable parameters of qLDPC codes. Here, we study stabilizer and subsystem codes with constrained check weight, combining analytical arguments with numerical optimization to establish strong upper bounds on their parameters. We show that stabilizer codes with checks of weight at most three cannot have nontrivial distance. We also prove tight tradeoffs between rate and distance for broad families of CSS stabilizer and subsystem codes with checks of weight at most four and two, respectively. Notably, our bounds are applicable to general qLDPC codes, as they rely only on check-weight constraints without assuming geometric locality or special graph connectivity. In the finite-size regime, we derive numerical upper bounds using linear programming techniques and identify explicit code constructions that approach these limits, delineating the landscape of practically relevant qLDPC codes with tens or hundreds of physical qubits.
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 show that for any R,ε>0 and any prime p≥2, there exists an infinite family of p-ary quantum low-density parity-check (QLDPC) codes, rate R, checks of weight Oε(1), and normalized distance at least δGV(p,R)−ε. Here, δGV(p,R) denotes the quantum Gilbert-Varshamov (GV) bound for p-ary stabilizer codes.
In fact, we construct an ensemble of such QLDPC codes, such that a random code from this ensemble is close to the GV bound with high probability. Moreover, this ensemble matches the performance of random stabilizer codes on several quantum channels. Specifically, it approaches the quantum capacity of the erasure channel and the hashing bound for memoryless Pauli channels, including the depolarizing channel.
A significant challenge in working with QLDPC codes is that they are necessarily \emph{degenerate}, i.e., contain many low-weight stabilizers. A key contribution of our work is a construction of QLDPC codes with quantitative control on their degeneracy. These codes are obtained by combining known constructions of asymptotically good QLDPC codes with the expander-based distance amplification procedure of Alon, Edmonds, and Luby [FOCS'95].
Our random ensemble is constructed by starting with these low-degeneracy QLDPC codes near the quantum Singleton bound and concatenating each coordinate with a random inner code. This can be viewed as a quantum analogue of Thommesen's construction, and as an LDPC version of a result of Ouyang, with an appropriately designed outer code.
Non-Abelian quantum codes connect quantum error correction, phases of matter, and computational resources. In this work, we develop a general framework for constructing non-Abelian quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes by gauging sheaf codes via cup products and use it to establish code families with constant encoding rate and linear distance, simultaneously achieving optimal asymptotic scaling in both parameters. In particular, we characterize explicit logical representatives of the full gauged code space, and provide a fundamental treatment of non-Abelian code distance in the sense of Knill--Laflamme based on combining expansion with cleaning to establish protection against arbitrary errors. We further construct an almost-good family with entire code spaces exhibiting long-range magic. Moreover, we use linearly addressable cup product to directly generate linearly many encoded magic states from gauging measurements of Clifford operators. These results extend good qLDPC codes beyond the Pauli stabilizer setting, lay the foundation for pursuing the no low-energy trivial magic conjecture and shed light on non-Abelian quantum phases and orders beyond geometric locality.