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arXiv:2505.03691

Sequential decoding of the XYZ$^2$ hexagonal stabilizer code

Basudha Srivastava, Yinzi Xiao, Anton Frisk Kockum, Ben Criger, Mats Granath

Published May 6, 2025• 0 citations
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Abstract

Quantum error correction requires accurate and efficient decoding to optimally suppress errors in the encoded information. For concatenated codes, where one code is embedded within another, optimal decoding can be achieved using a message-passing algorithm that sends conditional error probabilities from the lower-level code to a higher-level decoder. In this work, we study the XYZ$^2$ topological stabilizer code, defined on a honeycomb lattice, and use the fact that it can be viewed as a concatenation of a [[2, 1, 1]] phase-flip parity check code and the surface code with $YZZY$ stabilizers, to decode the syndrome information in two steps. We use this sequential decoding scheme to correct errors on data qubits, as well as measurement errors, under various biased error models using both a maximum-likelihood decoder (MLD) and more efficient matching-based decoders. For depolarizing noise we find that the sequential matching decoder gives a threshold of 18.3%, close to optimal, as a consequence of a favorable, effectively biased, error model on the upper-level YZZY code. For phase-biased noise on data qubits, at a bias $η= \frac{p_z}{p_x+p_y} = 10$, we find that a belief-matching-based decoder reaches thresholds of 24.1%, compared to 28.6% for the MLD. With measurement errors the thresholds are reduced to 3.4% and 4.3%, for depolarizing and biased noise respectively, using the belief-matching decoder. This demonstrates that the XYZ$^2$ code has thresholds that are competitive with other codes tailored to biased noise. The results also showcase two approaches to taking advantage of concatenated codes: 1) tailoring the upper-level code to the effective noise profile of the decoded lower-level code, and 2) making use of an upper-level decoder that can utilize the local information from the lower-level code.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2505.03691

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Sequential decoding of the XYZ2^22 hexagonal stabilizer code
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We consider a topological stabilizer code on a honeycomb grid, the "XYZ 2 " code. The code is inspired by the Kitaev honeycomb model and is a simple realization of a "matching code" discussed by Wootton [J. Phys. A: Math. Theor. 48, 215302 (2015)], with a specific implementation of the boundary. It utilizes weight-six ( XYZXYZ ) plaquette stabilizers and weight-two ( XX ) link stabilizers on a planar hexagonal grid composed of 2d2 qubits for code distance d , with weight-three stabilizers at the boundary, stabilizing one logical qubit. We study the properties of the code using maximum-likelihood decoding, assuming perfect stabilizer measurements. For pure X , Y , or Z noise, we can solve for the logical failure rate analytically, giving a threshold of 50%. In contrast to the rotated surface code and the XZZX code, which have code distance d2 only for pure Y noise, here the code distance is 2d2 for both pure Z and pure Y noise. Thresholds for noise with finite Z bias are similar to the XZZX code, but with markedly lower sub-threshold logical failure rates. The code possesses distinctive syndrome properties with unidirectional pairs of plaquette defects along the three directions of the triangular lattice for isolated errors, which may be useful for efficient matching-based or other approximate decoding.
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.
Biased-noise qubits, in which one type of error (e.g. XXX- and YYY-type errors) is significantly suppressed relative to the other (e.g. ZZZ-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≥7×104η\ge 7\times10^{4}η≥7×104, reducing the qubit overhead by over 50% at pZ=10−3p_Z=10^{-3}pZ​=10−3 and η=2×106η= 2 \times 10^6η=2×106 to achieve a logical error rate of 10−1210^{-12}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.
Efficient high-performance decoding of topological stabilizer codes has the potential to crucially improve the balance between logical failure rates and the number and individual error rates of the constituent qubits. High-threshold maximum-likelihood decoders require an explicit error model for Pauli errors to decode a specific syndrome, whereas lower-threshold heuristic approaches such as minimum-weight matching are error agnostic. Here we consider an intermediate approach, formulating a decoder that depends on the bias, i.e., the relative probability of phase-flip to bit-flip errors, but is agnostic to error rate. Our decoder is based on counting the number and effective weight of the most likely error chains in each equivalence class of a given syndrome. We use Metropolis-based Monte Carlo sampling to explore the space of error chains and find unique chains that are efficiently identified using a hash table. Using the error-rate invariance, the decoder can sample chains effectively at an error rate which is higher than the physical error rate and without the need for thermalization between chains in different equivalence classes. Applied to the surface code and the XZZXXZZXXZZX code, the decoder matches maximum-likelihood decoders for moderate code sizes or low error rates. We anticipate that, because of the compressed information content per syndrome, it can be taken full advantage of in combination with machine-learning methods to extrapolate Monte Carlo--generated data.
Quantum error correction, a technique that relies on the principle of redundancy to encode logical information into additional qubits to better protect the system from noise, is necessary to design a viable quantum computer. For this new topological stabilizer code-XYZ 2 code defined on the cellular lattice, it is implemented on a hexagonal lattice of qubits and it encodes the logical qubits with the help of stabilizer measurements of weight six and weight two. However topological stabilizer codes in cellular lattice quantum systems suffer from the detrimental effects of noise due to interaction with the environment. Several decoding approaches have been proposed to address this problem. Here, we propose the use of a state-attention based reinforcement learning decoder to decode XYZ 2 codes, which enables the decoder to more accurately focus on the information related to the current decoding position, and the error correction accuracy of our reinforcement learning decoder model under the optimisation conditions can reach 83.27% under the depolarizing noise model, and we have measured thresholds of 0.18856 and 0.19043 for XYZ 2 codes at code spacing of 3–7 and 7–11, respectively. our study provides directions and ideas for applications of decoding schemes combining reinforcement learning attention mechanisms to other topological quantum error-correcting codes.
Studying the threshold behavior of surface codes under biased noise models is an active area of research. Previous work Tuckett et al. (2018), using an optimal tensor-network decoder, demonstrated that replacing ZZZ-type stabilizers with YYY-type stabilizers significantly improves the surface code threshold under code-capacity level dephasing noise. In this work, we construct and study a ZYZYZY surface code by replacing the XXX-type stabilizers with YYY-type stabilizers. We compare it with the standard ZXZXZX surface code under circuit-level Pauli-XXX biased noise, with and without an additional gate-based XXXXXX crosstalk noise. We find that for the ZXZXZX surface code, the XXX-memory threshold increases monotonically with bias while the ZZZ-memory threshold decreases and saturates. For the ZYZYZY surface code, the YYY-memory threshold is nearly constant across all bias values. The ZZZ-memory thresholds of the ZXZXZX and ZYZYZY codes are consistent within the uncertainty. Adding XXXXXX crosstalk reduces the ZZZ-memory threshold beyond the fitting uncertainty while leaving the XXX memory threshold largely unaffected. The choice of CNOT ordering redistributes threshold performance between the two logical memories. Our work extends prior observations from code-capacity level noise to circuit-level noise. It also indicates the need for decoders capable of jointly reasoning over correlated syndrome information so that tailored stabilizer structures could be fully utilized for quantum error correction.