Quantum error correction (QEC) for generic errors is challenging due to the demanding threshold and resource requirements. Interestingly, when physical noise is biased, we can tailor our QEC schemes to the noise to improve performance. Here we study a family of codes having XZZX-type stabilizer generators, including a set of cyclic codes generalized from the five-qubit code and a set of topological codes that we call generalized toric codes (GTCs). We show that these XZZX codes are highly qubit efficient if tailored to biased noise. To characterize the code performance, we use the notion of effective distance, which generalizes code distance to the case of biased noise and constitutes a proxy for the logical failure rate. We find that the XZZX codes can achieve a favorable resource scaling by this metric under biased noise. We also show that the XZZX codes have remarkably high thresholds that reach what is achievable by random codes, and furthermore they can be efficiently decoded using matching decoders. Finally, by adding only one flag qubit, the XZZX codes can realize fault-tolerant QEC while preserving their large effective distance. In combination, our results show that tailored XZZX codes give a resource-efficient scheme for fault-tolerant QEC against biased noise.
Quantum error correction (QEC) for generic errors is challenging due to the demanding threshold and resource requirements. Interestingly, when physical noise is biased, we can tailor our QEC schemes to the noise to improve performance. Here we study a family of codes having XZZX-type stabilizer generators, including a set of cyclic codes generalized from the five-qubit code and a set of topological codes that we call generalized toric codes (GTCs). We show that these XZZX codes are highly qubit efficient if tailored to biased noise. To characterize the code performance, we use the notion of effective distance, which generalizes code distance to the case of biased noise and constitutes a proxy for the logical failure rate. We find that the XZZX codes can achieve a favorable resource scaling by this metric under biased noise. We also show that the XZZX codes have remarkably high thresholds that reach what is achievable by random codes, and furthermore they can be efficiently decoded using matching decoders. Finally, by adding only one flag qubit, the XZZX codes can realize fault-tolerant QEC while preserving their large effective distance. In combination, our results show that tailored XZZX codes give a resource-efficient scheme for fault-tolerant QEC against biased noise.
Quantum computing is one of the most promising technological revolutions of the last few decades. Despite its potential, one problem it suffers from is that quantum bits (or qubits), its basic units of information, are intrinsically susceptible to noise. To counter the effects of such noise, we need fault-tolerant quantum computing, and for that, we need a systematic method to protect quantum information. This is the role of quantum error correction (QEC). However, most QEC codes are built on the assumption that X- and Z-type errors occur with equal frequency, which is not always the case for some realistic quantum hardware platforms. Among the several QEC protocols currently developed, surface codes are the leading implementation due to their high thresholds and local connectivity. Previous results have shown that modified variants of these codes, such as the XZZX surface code, can perform well under biased noise. Despite being realizable in two-dimensional real architectures, surface codes have poor encoding rates, leading to large overheads that prevent them from being scalable in fault-tolerant quantum architectures. Quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes provide a promising alternative, since they can achieve higher encoding rates. In this thesis, we study the code-capacity performance of bias-tailored qLDPC codes under both X- and Z-bias Pauli noise. We construct bias-tailored qLDPC codes, including bivariate bicycle codes, generalized toric codes, and clustered-cyclic codes, by applying Hadamard deformations that transform the Calderbank-Shor-Steane (CSS) codes into non-CSS codes. Using Monte Carlo simulations with minimum-weight perfect matching and belief propagation with localized-statistics decoding, we evaluate the word error rate of these bias-tailored qLDPC codes across different bias regimes. We show that Hadamard-deformed qLDPC codes can yield substantial performance improvements under biased noise and can match or even surpass those performances obtained from XZZX surface code implementations. In particular, we find that generalized toric codes perform consistently the best under bias noise in comparison to the bivariate and clustered-cyclic codes. These results indicate that bias tailoring can be extended to high-rate qLDPC constructions, leading to future work to study their performance in more realistic settings, such as circuit-level noise.
In some quantum computing architectures, Pauli noise is highly biased. Tailoring Quantum error-correcting codes to the biased noise may benefit reducing the physical qubit overhead without reducing the logical error rate. In this paper, we propose a family of quantum XYZ cyclic codes, which are the only one family of quantum cyclic codes with code distance increasing with code length to our best knowledge and have good error-correcting performance against biased noise. Our simulation results show that the quantum XYZ cyclic codes have 50% code-capacity thresholds for all three types of pure Pauli noise and around 13% code-capacity threshold for depolarizing noise. In the finite-bias regime, when the noise is biased towards Pauli Z errors with noise bias ratios ηZ=1000, the corresponding code-capacity threshold is around 49%. Besides, we show that to reach the same code distance, the physical qubit overhead of XYZ cyclic code is much less than that of the XZZX surface code.
Biased-noise qubits, in which one type of error (e.g. X- and Y-type errors) is significantly suppressed relative to the other (e.g. Z-type errors), can significantly reduce the overhead of quantum error correction. Codes such as the rectangular surface code or XZZX code substantially reduce the qubit overhead under biased noise, but they still face challenges. The rectangular surface code suffers from a relatively low threshold, while the XZZX code requires twice as many physical qubits to maintain the same code distance as the surface code. In this work, we introduce a 2D local code construction that outperforms these codes for noise biases η≥7×104, reducing the qubit overhead by over 50% at pZ=10−3 and η=2×106 to achieve a logical error rate of 10−12. Our construction relies on the concatenation of two classical codes. The inner codes are repetition phase-flip codes while the outer codes are high-rate bit-flip codes enabled by their implementation at the logical level, which circumvents device connectivity constraints. These results indicate that under sufficiently biased noise, it is advantageous to address phase-flip and bit-flip errors at different layers of the coding scheme. The inner code should prioritize a high threshold for phase-flip errors, while the bit-flip outer code should optimize for encoding rate efficiency. In the strong biased-noise regime, high-rate outer codes keep the overhead for correcting residual bit-flip errors comparable to that of the repetition code itself, meaningfully lower than that required by earlier approaches.
Abstract Fault-tolerant cluster states form the basis for scalable measurement-based quantum computation. Recently, new stabilizer codes for scalable circuit-based quantum computation have been introduced that have very high thresholds under biased noise where the qubit predominantly suffers from one type of error, e.g. dephasing. However, extending these advances in stabilizer codes to generate high-threshold cluster states for biased noise has been a challenge, as the standard method for foliating stabilizer codes to generate fault-tolerant cluster states does not preserve the noise bias. In this work, we overcome this barrier by introducing a generalization of the cluster state that allows us to foliate stabilizer codes in a bias-preserving way. As an example of our approach, we construct a foliated version of the XZZX code which we call the XZZX cluster state. We demonstrate that under a circuit-level-noise model, our XZZX cluster state has a threshold more than double the usual cluster state when dephasing errors are more likely than errors that cause bit flips by a factor of order ~100 or more.
We find that the substantial advantages predicted for bias-tailored quantum error correction (QEC) under code-capacity noise are strongly reduced once realistic syndrome extraction and circuit-level noise models are considered. We start by comparing XZZX codes to rectangular surface codes with a bias-dependent optimised anisotropy. Although code-capacity simulations predict an advantage of rectangular surface codes in the limit of high noise bias, this actually disappears under circuit-level noise, making the XZZX codes the preferred and simplest choice even for platforms that allow for a flexible variation of the code layout adapted to changes in noise calibration. Our results identify bias degradation during syndrome extraction under circuit-level noise as the central limitation of biased-tailored QEC. To partially mitigate this effect, we introduce a bias-filtering CNOT gadget that temporarily encodes the ancillary target qubit during syndrome extraction in a repetition code and, upon measurement and feed forward, manages to reduce the bias degradation. In a regime of high-bias and low-idle errors, this bias-filtering gadget yields a few-percent relative improvement of the XZZX code error threshold, demonstrating that lightweight bias-filtering strategies can recover part of the lost bias-tailoring advantage for realistic circuit-level noise.
Quantum computers are highly sensitive to noise due to interactions with the environment, which severely limits the utility of near-term devices. Quantum error correction addresses this challenge by encoding logical information over multiple qubits in order to preserve information in the presence of noise. This facilitates the realization of the theoretical advantages of quantum computing such as exponential speed-up compared to classical computers for certain algorithms. Physical realizations of qubits may have different noise profiles, including biased noise, where phase-flip errors may be more likely than bit-flip errors. We propose a quantum error-correcting code, the XYZ² code, which is tailored to biased noise. The code has high error thresholds against biased noise, below which logical errors are exponentially suppressed with the linear dimension of the code. The important classical task of deriving corrections given partial information about errors is called decoding. We investigate several decoding strategies tailored to specific challenges, ranging from a novel maximum-likelihood sampling decoder, to a model-free, data-driven, neural-network-based decoder, to an efficient multi-step decoder for concatenated codes. We also study the link between quantum error-correcting codes and their statistical-mechanical counterparts by mapping to generalized random-bond Ising models and subsequently deriving the exact results for finite-size corrections under biased noise for moderate code sizes. Quantum error correction is still in its developing stages, and this work provides a useful contribution to the field by bridging a gap between theory and practice. By adapting well-studied topological codes to error models that are closer to reality, this work paves the way for the realization of a fault-tolerant quantum architecture.