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arXiv:2512.13891

Quantum Anticodes

ChunJun Cao, Giuseppe Cotardo, Brad Lackey

quant-phcs.ITSubmitted Dec 15, 2025• Announced Dec 17, 2025• 0 citations
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Abstract

This work introduces a symplectic framework for quantum error correcting codes in which local structure is analyzed through an anticode perspective. In this setting, a code is treated as a symplectic space, and anticodes arise as maximal symplectic subspaces whose elements vanish on a prescribed set of components, providing a natural quantum analogue of their classical counterparts. This framework encompasses several families of quantum codes, including stabilizer and subsystem codes, provides a natural extension of generalized distances in quantum codes, and yields new invariants that capture local algebraic and combinatorial features. The notion of anticodes also naturally leads to operations such as puncturing and shortening for symplectic codes, which in turn provide algebraic interpretations of key phenomena in quantum error correction, such as the cleaning lemma and complementary recovery and yield new descriptions of weight enumerators.

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This work introduces a symplectic framework for quantum error correcting codes in which local structure is analyzed through an anticode perspective. In this setting, a code is treated as a symplectic space, and anticodes arise as maximal symplectic subspaces whose elements vanish on a prescribed set of components, providing a natural quantum analogue of their classical counterparts. This framework encompasses several families of quantum codes, including stabilizer and subsystem codes, provides a natural extension of generalized distances in quantum codes, and yields new invariants that capture local algebraic and combinatorial features. The notion of anticodes also naturally leads to operations such as puncturing and shortening for symplectic codes, which in turn provide algebraic interpretations of key phenomena in quantum error correction, such as the cleaning lemma and complementary recovery and yield new descriptions of weight enumerators.
The importance of quantum error correction in paving the way to build a practical quantum computer is no longer in doubt. This dissertation makes a threefold contribution to the mathematical theory of quantum error-correcting codes. Firstly, it extends the framework of an important class of quantum codes -- nonbinary stabilizer codes. It clarifies the connections of stabilizer codes to classical codes over quadratic extension fields, provides many new constructions of quantum codes, and develops further the theory of optimal quantum codes and punctured quantum codes. Secondly, it contributes to the theory of operator quantum error correcting codes also called as subsystem codes. These codes are expected to have efficient error recovery schemes than stabilizer codes. This dissertation develops a framework for study and analysis of subsystem codes using character theoretic methods. In particular, this work establishes a close link between subsystem codes and classical codes showing that the subsystem codes can be constructed from arbitrary classical codes. Thirdly, it seeks to exploit the knowledge of noise to design efficient quantum codes and considers more realistic channels than the commonly studied depolarizing channel. It gives systematic constructions of asymmetric quantum stabilizer codes that exploit the asymmetry of errors in certain quantum channels.
Stabilizer codes form an important class of quantum error correcting codes which have an elegant theory, efficient error detection, and many known examples. Constructing stabilizer codes of length nnn is equivalent to constructing subspaces of Fpn×Fpn\mathbb{F}_p^n \times \mathbb{F}_p^nFpn​×Fpn​ which are "isotropic" under the symplectic bilinear form defined by ⟨(a,b),(c,d)⟩=aTd−bTc\left\langle (\mathbf{a},\mathbf{b}),(\mathbf{c},\mathbf{d}) \right\rangle = \mathbf{a}^{\mathrm{T}} \mathbf{d} - \mathbf{b}^{\mathrm{T}} \mathbf{c}⟨(a,b),(c,d)⟩=aTd−bTc. As a result, many, but not all, ideas from the theory of classical error correction can be translated to quantum error correction. One of the main theoretical contribution of this article is to study stabilizer codes starting with a different symplectic form. In this paper, we concentrate on cyclic codes. Modifying the symplectic form allows us to generalize the previous known construction for linear cyclic stabilizer codes, and in the process, circumvent some of the Galois theoretic no-go results proved there. More importantly, this tweak in the symplectic form allows us to make use of well known error correcting algorithms for cyclic codes to give efficient quantum error correcting algorithms. Cyclicity of error correcting codes is a "basis dependent" property. Our codes are no more "cyclic" when they are derived using the standard symplectic forms (if we ignore the error correcting properties like distance, all such symplectic forms can be converted to each other via a basis transformation). Hence this change of perspective is crucial from the point of view of designing efficient decoding algorithm for these family of codes. In this context, recall that for general codes, efficient decoding algorithms do not exist if some widely believed complexity theoretic assumptions are true.
Quantum synchronizable codes are quantum error-correcting codes that can correct the effects of quantum noise as well as block synchronization errors. We improve the known general framework for designing quantum synchronizable codes through more extensive use of the theory of finite fields. This makes it possible to widen the range of tolerable magnitude of block synchronization errors while giving mathematical insight into the algebraic mechanism of synchronization recovery. Also given are families of quantum synchronizable codes based on punctured Reed-Muller codes and their ambient spaces.
The essential insight of quantum error correction was that quantum information can be protected by suitably encoding this quantum information across multiple independently erred quantum systems. Recently it was realized that, since the most general method for encoding quantum information is to encode it into a subsystem, there exists a novel form of quantum error correction beyond the traditional quantum error correcting subspace codes. These new quantum error correcting subsystem codes differ from subspace codes in that their quantum correcting routines can be considerably simpler than related subspace codes. Here we present a class of quantum error correcting subsystem codes constructed from two classical linear codes. These codes are the subsystem versions of the quantum error correcting subspace codes which are generalizations of Shor's original quantum error correcting subspace codes. For every Shor-type code, the codes we present give a considerable savings in the number of stabilizer measurements needed in their error recovery routines.
Quantum information processing promises exponential advantages for certain computational and communication tasks, but practical quantum devices are inherently vulnerable to decoherence and operational imperfections. This thesis develops new algebraic and analytical tools for quantum error correction (QEC) aimed at unifying entanglement-assisted coding theory with operator-algebra frameworks, while also providing mathematically rigorous insights for continuous-variable photonic implementations. First, we introduce the framework of entanglement-assisted operator algebra quantum error correction (EA-OAQEC), extending entanglement-assisted QEC in an operator-algebra context. Built on a stabilizer-based formalism, EA-OAQEC unifies and generalizes subspace, subsystem, and hybrid classical-quantum entanglement-assisted codes. We establish a master error-correction theorem, define a generalized distance notion, and develop constructive techniques including gauge fixing, clean-qubit transformations, and entanglement-assisted gauge-fixing procedures. Second, we study general logical operators: unitaries that preserve a stabilizer codespace beyond the traditional Pauli normalizer. We derive explicit structure theorems for the centralizer and normalizer in the full unitary setting and show how normalizer transformations can be parameterized via classical bit matrix multiply complement (BMMC) permutations. Finally, motivated by photonic quantum computing, we analyze finite-rank compressions of the continuous position and momentum operators relevant to Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) codes. We prove that the spectra of these compressions are governed by the roots of classical Hermite polynomials and connect the compressed operators to physically realizable approximations of displacement operations and finite-energy GKP states.
The most general method for encoding quantum information is not to encode the information into a subspace of a Hilbert space, but to encode information into a subsystem of a Hilbert space. Recently this notion has led to a more general notion of quantum error correction known as operator quantum error correction. In standard quantum error-correcting codes, one requires the ability to apply a procedure which exactly reverses on the error-correcting subspace any correctable error. In contrast, for operator error-correcting subsystems, the correction procedure need not undo the error which has occurred, but instead one must perform corrections only modulo the subsystem structure. This does not lead to codes which differ from subspace codes, but does lead to recovery routines which explicitly make use of the subsystem structure. Here we present two examples of such operator error-correcting subsystems. These examples are motivated by simple spatially local Hamiltonians on square and cubic lattices. In three dimensions we provide evidence, in the form a simple mean field theory, that our Hamiltonian gives rise to a system which is self-correcting. Such a system will be a natural high-temperature quantum memory, robust to noise without external intervening quantum error-correction procedures.