Locally recoverable codes (LRCs) with locality parameter r can recover any erased code symbol by accessing r other code symbols. This local recovery property is of great interest in large-scale distributed classical data storage systems as it leads to efficient repair of failed nodes. A well-known class of optimal (classical) LRCs are subcodes of Reed-Solomon codes constructed using a special type of polynomials called good polynomials. Recently, Golowich and Guruswami initiated the study of quantum LRCs (qLRCs), which could have applications in quantum data storage systems of the future. The authors presented a qLRC construction based on good polynomials arising out of subgroups of the multiplicative group of finite fields. In this paper, we present a qLRC construction method that can employ any good polynomial. We also propose a new approach for designing good polynomials using subgroups of affine general linear groups. Golowich and Guruswami also derived a lower bound on the minimum distance of their qLRC under the restriction that r+1 is prime. Using similar techniques in conjunction with the expander mixing lemma, we develop minimum distance lower bounds for our qLRCs without the r+1 prime restriction.
Locally recoverable codes (LRCs) with locality parameter r can recover any erased code symbol by accessing r other code symbols. This local recovery property is of great interest in large-scale distributed classical data storage systems as it leads to efficient repair of failed nodes. A well-known class of optimal (classical) LRCs are subcodes of Reed-Solomon codes constructed using a special type of polynomials called good polynomials. Recently, Golowich and Guruswami initiated the study of quantum LRCs (qLRCs), which could have applications in quantum data storage systems of the future. The authors presented a qLRC construction based on good polynomials arising out of subgroups of the multiplicative group of finite fields. In this paper, we present a qLRC construction method that can employ any good polynomial. We also propose a new approach for designing good polynomials using subgroups of affine general linear groups. Golowich and Guruswami also derived a lower bound on the minimum distance of their qLRC under the restriction that r+1 is prime. Using similar techniques in conjunction with the expander mixing lemma, we develop minimum distance lower bounds for our qLRCs without the r+1 prime restriction.
Classical locally recoverable codes, which permit highly efficient recovery from localized errors as well as global recovery from larger errors, provide some of the most useful codes for distributed data storage in practice. In this paper, we initiate the study of quantum locally recoverable codes (qLRCs). In the long term, like their classical counterparts, such qLRCs may be used for large-scale quantum data storage. Our results also have concrete implications for quantum LDPC codes, which are applicable to near-term quantum error-correction. After defining quantum local recoverability, we provide an explicit construction of qLRCs based on the classical LRCs of Tamo and Barg (2014), which we show have (1) a close-to-optimal rate-distance tradeoff (i.e. near the Singleton bound), (2) an efficient decoder, and (3) permit good spatial locality in a physical implementation. Although the analysis is significantly more involved than in the classical case, we obtain close-to-optimal parameters by introducing a "folded" version of our quantum Tamo-Barg (qTB) codes, which we then analyze using a combination of algebraic techniques. We furthermore present and analyze two additional constructions using more basic techniques, namely random qLRCs, and qLRCs from AEL distance amplification. Each of these constructions has some advantages, but neither achieves all 3 properties of our folded qTB codes described above. We complement these constructions with Singleton-like bounds that show our qLRC constructions achieve close-to-optimal parameters. We also apply these results to obtain Singleton-like bounds for qLDPC codes, which to the best of our knowledge are novel. We then show that even the weakest form of a stronger locality property called local correctability, which permits more robust local recovery and is achieved by certain classical codes, is impossible quantumly.
Constructions of Quantum (r,δ)-LRCs from cyclic codes
Classical (r,δ) locally recoverable codes (LRCs) play a central role in distributed data storage systems as they enable an efficient recovery from erasures by accessing a small number of surviving symbols. Motivated by their prospective use in future quantum data storage and by recent theoretical progress on quantum locally recoverable codes (qLRCs), we investigate the construction of qLRCs from classical cyclic (r,δ)-LRCs. Our approach identifies cyclic LRCs whose defining sets satisfy a dual-containing condition, allowing them to serve as valid CSS ingredients. We present three explicit families of (r,δ)-qLRCs, two of which are optimal with respect to the quantum Singleton-like bound, whenever the codes are pure, thereby providing optimal examples. Additionally, the codes presented in Constructions 2 and 3 have no bound on their lengths with respect to the field size required to obtain these codes.
In a recent work, quantum locally recoverable codes (qLRCs) have been introduced for their potential application in large-scale quantum data storage and implication for quantum LDPC codes. This work focuses on the bounds and constructions of qLRCs derived from the Hermitian construction, which solves an open problem proposed by Luo etal. (IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, 71 (3): 1794-1802, 2025). We present four bounds for qLRCs and give comparisons in terms of their asymptotic formulas. We construct several new infinite families of NMDS codes, with general and flexible dimensions, that support t-designs for t∈{2,3}, and apply them to obtain Hermitian dual-containing classical LRCs (cLRCs). As a result, we derive three explicit families of optimal qLRCs. Compared to the known qLRCs obtained by the CSS construction, our optimal qLRCs offer new and more flexible parameters. It is also worth noting that the constructed cLRCs themselves are interesting as they are optimal with respect to four distinct bounds for cLRCs.
Quantum locally recoverable codes (qLRCs), introduced recently by Golowich and Guruswami, allow any single-qudit erasure to be recovered from a small set of other qudits. Most known constructions require a large alphabet. We systematically investigate qLRCs obtained, via the CSS construction, from classical constacyclic codes over small fields $\Ff_q$ with q∈{2,3,4,5,7}. First, we prove that a nonzero dual-containing λ-constacyclic code exists only when λ2=1, so that negacyclic and (repeated-root) cyclic codes exhaust the constacyclic route to qLRCs. Second, we show that the locality of a constacyclic code equals the minimum distance of its dual minus one, and we give a simple purity criterion for the resulting quantum codes. Third, we show that odd-like duadic codes whose splitting is given by μ−1 yield pure qLRCs; specializing to q-ary quadratic residue codes of prime length p≡3(mod4) gives an infinite family of pure qLRCs with unbounded minimum distance and certified locality. Finally, by means of concrete computations, we obtain a classification of qLRCs from cyclic, negacyclic, and repeated-root cyclic codes of moderate lengths, which contains the first binary qLRCs from repeated-root cyclic codes and many parameter sets that cyclic codes cannot attain.
In this work, we study (r,t,x) quantum locally recoverable codes (qLRCs) with locality r, t recovery sets per qudit, and intersection parameter x. We first show that, assuming the underlying classical codes have dual minimum distance at least two, a CSS code is an (r,t,x)-qLRC if and only if the underlying classical codes are (r,t,x) classical LRCs (cLRCs) with common recovery sets. We then use subset-inclusion matrices to construct families of binary dual-containing (r,t,x)-cLRCs, which yield binary (r,t,x)-qLRCs via the CSS construction. For CSS (r,t,x)-qLRCs, we derive upper bounds on the dimension and rate, minimum-distance bounds in the pure case, and a Singleton-like dimension bound in the exact case. Finally, we show that these families attain high rates and nontrivial minimum distances.
By incorporating the concept of locality into quantum information theory, quantum locally recoverable codes (qLRCs) have been proposed, motivated by their potential applications in large-scale quantum data storage and their relevance to quantum LDPC codes. Despite the progress in optimal quantum error-correcting codes (QECCs), optimal constructions of qLRCs remain largely unexplored, partly due to the fact that the existing bounds for qLRCs are not sufficiently tight. In this paper, we focus on pure qLRCs derived from the Hermitian construction. We provide several new bounds for pure qLRCs and demonstrate that they are tighter than previously known bounds. Moreover, we show that a variety of classical QECCs, including quantum Hamming codes, quantum GRM codes, and quantum Solomon-Stiffler codes, give rise to pure qLRCs with explicit parameters. Based on these constructions, we further identify many infinite families of optimal qLRCs with respect to different bounds, achieving code lengths much larger than those of known optimal qLRCs.