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arXiv:2208.11800 · IEEE BITS the Information Theory Magazine

No $((n,K,d< 127))$ Code Can Violate the Quantum Hamming Bound

Emanuel Dallas, Faidon Andreadakis, Daniel A. Lidar

Published Dec 1, 2022• 2 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

It is well-known that non-degenerate quantum error correcting codes (QECCs) are constrained by a quantum version of the Hamming bound. Whether degenerate codes also obey such a bound, however, remains a long-standing question with practical implications for the efficacy of QECCs. We employ a combination of previously derived bounds on QECCs to demonstrate that a subset of all codes must obey the quantum Hamming bound. Specifically, we combine an analytical bound due to Rains with a numerical bound due to Li and Xing to show that no$((n,K,d))$code with$d< 127$can violate the quantum Hamming bound.

DOI
10.1109/mbits.2023.3262219

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No ((n,K,d<127))((n,K,d< 127))((n,K,d<127)) Code Can Violate the Quantum Hamming Bound
It is well-known that non-degenerate quantum error correcting codes (QECCs) are constrained by a quantum version of the Hamming bound. Whether degenerate codes also obey such a bound, however, remains a long-standing question with practical implications for the efficacy of QECCs. We employ a combination of previously derived bounds on QECCs to demonstrate that a subset of all codes must obey the quantum Hamming bound. Specifically, we combine an analytical bound due to Rains with a numerical bound due to Li and Xing to show that no((n,K,d))((n,K,d))((n,K,d))code withd<127d< 127d<127can violate the quantum Hamming bound.
The quantum Hamming bound is the standard finite-length sphere-packing bound for exact correction of arbitrary qubit errors. Whether degeneracy can evade this bound has remained unresolved in full generality for nearly three decades: distinct correctable errors may act identically on the code space, so the usual disjoint-sphere argument breaks down. We prove that every exact binary quantum subspace code with K>1K>1K>1 obeys the bound, without assuming either nondegeneracy or additivity. Our proof turns the Li--Xing linear-programming polynomial into an exact intersection count for quaternary Hamming balls. Monotonicity in block length and in ball-center separation then reduces the problem to a local node--edge charging inequality at the shortest admissible length. Thus degeneracy can merge correctable error sectors, but cannot enlarge the finite-length binary Hamming bound.
We give an infinite family of degenerate entanglement-assisted quantum error-correcting codes (EAQECCs) which violate the EA-quantum Hamming bound for non-degenerate EAQECCs and achieve the EA-quantum Singleton bound, thereby proving that the EA-quantum Hamming bound does not asymptotically hold for degenerate EAQECCs. Unlike the previously known quantum error-correcting codes that violate the quantum Hamming bound by exploiting maximally entangled pairs of qubits, our codes do not require local unitary operations on the entangled auxiliary qubits during encoding. The degenerate EAQECCs we present are constructed from classical error-correcting codes with poor minimum distances, which implies that, unlike the majority of known EAQECCs with large minimum distances, our EAQECCs take more advantage of degeneracy and rely less on the error correction capabilities of classical codes.
The quantum Hamming bound arises from a direct dimension estimate for exact quantum error-correcting codes. For nondegenerate codes, distinct correctable errors map the code space into orthogonal subspaces, so dimension counting directly gives the bound; degeneracy allows these subspaces to overlap and invalidates the argument. Although linear-programming, asymptotic, and structural approaches have advanced the problem from several directions, the general local-dimension case has remained open. Here we prove the quantum Hamming bound for every local dimension q≥3q\ge3q≥3. Building on the exact two-center Fourier reduction, we develop new overlap estimates for nonbinary Hamming spaces. For q≥4q\ge4q≥4, Jacobi estimates and monotonicity give a uniform gap; qutrits form the boundary case where the gap vanishes and are handled by a filtered correction. This completes the finite-length nonbinary case; together with the existing qubit result, it establishes the quantum Hamming bound for arbitrary local dimension.
The quantum Hamming bound was originally put forward as an upper bound on the parameters of nondegenerate quantum codes, but over the past few decades much work has been done to show that many degenerate quantum codes must also obey this bound. In this paper, we show that there is a Hamming-like bound stricter than the quantum Hamming bound that applies to degenerate ttt-error-correcting stabilizer codes of length greater than some positive integer N(t)N(t)N(t). We show that this bound holds for all single-error-correcting degenerate stabilizer codes, forcing all but a handful of optimal distance-3 stabilizer codes to be nondegenerate.
We study the error correcting properties of Haar random codes, in which a KKK-dimensional code space C⊆CN\boldsymbol{C} \subseteq \mathbb{C}^NC⊆CN is chosen at random from the Haar distribution. Our main result is that Haar random codes can approximately correct errors up to the quantum Hamming bound, meaning that a set of mmm Pauli errors can be approximately corrected so long as mK≪NmK \ll NmK≪N. This is the strongest bound known for any family of quantum error correcting codes (QECs), and continues a line of work showing that approximate QECs can significantly outperform exact QECs [LNCY97, CGS05, BGG24]. Our proof relies on a recent matrix concentration result of Bandeira, Boedihardjo, and van Handel.