Quantum Error-Correcting Codes (QECCs) play a crucial role in enhancing the robustness of quantum computing and communication systems against errors. Within the realm of QECCs, stabilizer codes, and specifically graph codes, stand out for their distinct attributes and promising utility in quantum technologies. This study underscores the significance of devising expansive QECCs and adopts the ZX-calculus a graphical language adept at quantum computational reasoning-to depict the encoders of graph codes effectively. Through the integration of ZX-calculus with established encoder frameworks, we present a nuanced approach that leverages this graphical representation to facilitate the construction of large-scale QECCs. Our methodology is rigorously applied to examine the intricacies of concatenated graph codes and the development of holographic codes, thus demonstrating the practicality of our graphical approach in addressing complex quantum error correction challenges. This research contributes to the theoretical understanding of quantum error correction and offers practical tools for its application, providing objective advancements in the field of quantum computing.
Quantum Error-Correcting Codes (QECCs) play a crucial role in enhancing the robustness of quantum computing and communication systems against errors. Within the realm of QECCs, stabilizer codes, and specifically graph codes, stand out for their distinct attributes and promising utility in quantum technologies. This study underscores the significance of devising expansive QECCs and adopts the ZX-calculus a graphical language adept at quantum computational reasoning-to depict the encoders of graph codes effectively. Through the integration of ZX-calculus with established encoder frameworks, we present a nuanced approach that leverages this graphical representation to facilitate the construction of large-scale QECCs. Our methodology is rigorously applied to examine the intricacies of concatenated graph codes and the development of holographic codes, thus demonstrating the practicality of our graphical approach in addressing complex quantum error correction challenges. This research contributes to the theoretical understanding of quantum error correction and offers practical tools for its application, providing objective advancements in the field of quantum computing.
Abstract We introduce a high-level graphical framework for designing and analysing quantum error correcting codes, centred on what we term the coherent parity check (CPC). The graphical formulation is based on the diagrammatic tools of the ZX-calculus of quantum observables. The resulting framework leads to a construction for stabilizer codes that allows us to design and verify a broad range of quantum codes based on classical ones, and that gives a means of discovering large classes of codes using both analytical and numerical methods. We focus in particular on the smaller codes that will be the first used by near-term devices. We show how CSS codes form a subset of CPC codes and, more generally, how to compute stabilizers for a CPC code. As an explicit example of this framework, we give a method for turning almost any pair of classical [ n , k , 3 ] codes into a [ [ 2 n − k + 2 , k , 3 ] ] CPC code. Further, we give a simple technique for machine search which yields thousands of potential codes, and demonstrate its operation for distance 3 and 5 codes. Finally, we use the graphical tools to demonstrate how Clifford computation can be performed within CPC codes. As our framework gives a new tool for constructing small- to medium-sized codes with relatively high code rates, it provides a new source for codes that could be suitable for emerging devices, while its ZX-calculus foundations enable natural integration of error correction with graphical compiler toolchains. It also provides a powerful framework for reasoning about all stabilizer quantum error correction codes of any size.
We introduce the Scalable ZX-calculus (SZX-calculus for short), a formal and compact graphical language for the design and verification of quantum computations. The SZX-calculus is an extension of the ZX-calculus, a powerful framework that captures graphically the fundamental properties of quantum mechanics through its complete set of rewrite rules. The ZX-calculus is, however, a low level language, with each wire representing a single qubit. This limits its ability to handle large and elaborate quantum evolutions. We extend the ZX-calculus to registers of qubits and allow compact representation of sub-diagrams via binary matrices. We show soundness and completeness of the SZX-calculus and provide two examples of applications, for graph states and error correcting codes.
Many stabilizer quantum error-correcting codes are built from a finite pattern repeated across space or time, such as lattice codes, translation-invariant graph states, and quantum convolutional codes. Ordinary stabilizer ZX-diagrams capture only finite truncations of such systems, obscuring the repeated structure that defines them. We introduce the delayed stabilizer ZX-calculus, a finite graphical language for these infinite, translation-invariant processes. It extends the odd-prime-dimensional stabilizer ZX-calculus with a single new generator, the delay, which feeds data from one time step to the next. We equip the calculus with two semantics. In the first semantics, we interpret the behaviour of a delayed ZX-diagram as an equivalence class of sequences of quantum channels; where two sequences are identified if they have the same information content. We show that the behaviour of a delayed ZX-diagram uniquely determines an infinite stabilizer group. In the second semantics, we interpret the delay as a formal variable, encoding the translation-invariant families of Pauli operators as generating functions. This allows us to represent a delayed ZX-diagram in terms of a tableau of generating functions, from which the infinite stabilizer group can be recovered. Finally, we give a complete axiomatization of the delayed stabilizer ZX-calculus, featuring generalised Euler decomposition and colour change rules. Using generalised forms of local complementation and pivoting, we reduce every diagram to a unique normal form. This establishes soundness, universality, and completeness for the generating tableau semantics.
We present a quantum compilation algorithm that maps Clifford encoders, encoding maps for stabilizer quantum codes, to a unique graphical representation in the ZX calculus. Specifically, we develop a canonical form in the ZX calculus and prove canonicity as well as efficient reducibility of any Clifford encoder into the canonical form. The diagrams produced by our compiler visualize information propagation and entanglement structure of the encoder, revealing properties that may be obscured in the circuit or stabilizer-tableau representation. Consequently, our canonical representation may be an informative technique for the design of new stabilizer quantum codes via graph theory analysis.
The ZX-calculus is a graphical language for suitably represented tensor networks, called ZX-diagrams. Calculations are performed by transforming ZX-diagrams with rewrite rules. The ZX-calculus has found applications in reasoning about quantum circuits, condensed matter systems, quantum algorithms, quantum error correcting codes, and counting problems. A key notion is the stabiliser fragment of the ZX-calculus, a subfamily of ZX-diagrams for which rewriting can be done efficiently in terms of derived simplifying rewrites. Recently, higher dimensional qudits - in particular, qutrits - have gained prominence within quantum computing research. The main contribution of this work is the derivation of efficient rewrite strategies for the stabiliser fragment of the qutrit ZX-calculus. Notably, this constitutes a first non-trivial step towards the simplification of qutrit quantum circuits. We then give further unexpected areas in which these rewrite strategies provide complexity-theoretic insight; namely, we reinterpret known results about evaluating the Jones polynomial, an important link invariant in knot theory, and counting graph colourings.