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arXiv:2606.32001

Spatially Coupled MacKay-Neal/Hsu-Anastasopoulos CSS Codes Achieve the Quantum-Erasure Hashing Bound by Seeded BP Decoding

Kenta Kasai

quant-phcs.ITSubmitted Jun 30, 2026• Announced Jul 1, 2026• 0 citations

v1 · Jun 30, 2026 v2 · Sep 13, 2026

Abstract

In classical sparse-graph coding, spatial coupling is a mechanism by which belief-propagation (BP) decoding attains the maximum-a-posteriori (MAP) or area-threshold performance of the uncoupled system. Since MacKay-Neal/Hsu-Anastasopoulos (MN/HA) punctured sparse ensembles achieve capacity under MAP decoding, it is natural to ask whether spatially coupled MN/HA-type Calderbank-Shor-Steane (CSS) codes can reach the hashing bound on the quantum erasure channel under seeded BP decoding. We answer this question at the density evolution (DE) level for hard-erasure CSS decoding. On an erased coordinate, the two binary Pauli components remain unresolved, equivalently the erased qubit is represented by the four Pauli possibilities. We first define the CSS ensemble through sparse punctured matrices and the corresponding dense parity-check matrices. For fixed finite Z-side, X-side, and check degrees, we then derive a five-message uncoupled DE recursion, decompose it into Z-side and X-side constituent systems, and define the two constituent potentials. Applying the coupled-vector potential method to the two constituents separately proves that seeded BP decoding on the resulting finite-degree factor graphs reaches the smaller of the Z-side degree ratio and the X-side complementary degree ratio. In the X/Z equal-rate specialization, where the Z-side and X-side constituent design rates are equal, this BP threshold is the hashing-bound channel parameter determined by the design rate. Thus the paper gives a DE-level proof that seeded BP decoding with finite-degree factor graphs achieves the hashing bound for the X/Z equal-rate family. Finite-length BP concentration, block-error convergence, and a finite-code realization of the ideal DE seed are separate questions.

Comments: 29 pages, 8 figures

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In classical sparse-graph coding, spatial coupling is a mechanism by which belief-propagation (BP) decoding attains the maximum-a-posteriori (MAP) or area-threshold performance of the uncoupled system. Since MacKay-Neal/Hsu-Anastasopoulos (MN/HA) punctured sparse ensembles achieve capacity under MAP decoding, it is natural to ask whether spatially coupled MN/HA-type Calderbank-Shor-Steane (CSS) codes can reach the hashing bound on the quantum erasure channel under seeded BP decoding. We answer this question at the density evolution (DE) level for hard-erasure CSS decoding. On an erased coordinate, the two binary Pauli components remain unresolved, equivalently the erased qubit is represented by the four Pauli possibilities. We first define the CSS ensemble through sparse punctured matrices and the corresponding dense parity-check matrices. For fixed finite Z-side, X-side, and check degrees, we then derive a five-message uncoupled DE recursion, decompose it into Z-side and X-side constituent systems, and define the two constituent potentials. Applying the coupled-vector potential method to the two constituents separately proves that seeded BP decoding on the resulting finite-degree factor graphs reaches the smaller of the Z-side degree ratio and the X-side complementary degree ratio. In the X/Z equal-rate specialization, where the Z-side and X-side constituent design rates are equal, this BP threshold is the hashing-bound channel parameter determined by the design rate. Thus the paper gives a DE-level proof that seeded BP decoding with finite-degree factor graphs achieves the hashing bound for the X/Z equal-rate family. Finite-length BP concentration, block-error convergence, and a finite-code realization of the ideal DE seed are separate questions.

Kudekar et al. recently proved that for transmission over the binary erasure channel (BEC), spatial coupling of LDPC codes increases the BP threshold of the coupled ensemble to the MAP threshold of the underlying LDPC codes. One major drawback of the capacity-achieving spatially-coupled LDPC codes is that one needs to increase the column and row weight of parity-check matrices of the underlying LDPC codes. It is proved, that Hsu-Anastasopoulos (HA) codes and MacKay-Neal (MN) codes achieve the capacity of memoryless binary-input symmetric-output channels under MAP decoding with bounded column and row weight of the parity-check matrices. The HA codes and the MN codes are dual codes each other. The aim of this paper is to present an empirical evidence that spatially-coupled MN (resp. HA) codes with bounded column and row weight achieve the capacity of the BEC. To this end, we introduce a spatial coupling scheme of MN (resp. HA) codes. By density evolution analysis, we will show that the resulting spatially-coupled MN (resp. HA) codes have the BP threshold close to the Shannon limit.

We construct asymptotically good nested Calderbank-Shor-Steane (CSS) code pairs from Hsu-Anastasopoulos codes and MacKay-Neal codes. For fixed balanced triples with even component degrees and

j_Z\ge4

, we prove that the coding rate stays bounded away from zero and that the relative distances on both sides stay bounded away from zero with probability tending to one as the blocklength grows. Moreover, within an explicit low-degree search window, we prove that all 56 balanced triples in that window with even common row degree, column degree at least four, and positive design quantum rate attain the classical Gilbert-Varshamov (GV) bound on both constituent sides, and consequently the CSS GV bound at fixed finite degree.

MacKay-Neal (MN) and Hsu-Anastasopoulos (HA) low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes are known to achieve the capacity of memoryless binary-input symmetric-output channels under maximum likelihood (ML) decoding with bounded col- umn and row weight in their associated parity-check matrices. Recently, Kasai and Sakaniwa showed that spatially coupled (SC) versions of the MN and HA LDPC codes have belief propagation (BP) iterative decoding thresholds that approach capacity on the binary erasure channel (BEC) as the coupling length increases. In this paper, we extend the results of Kasai and Sakaniwa to the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel and show that the thresholds of the SC-MN and SC-HA ensembles approach capacity with bounded density as the coupling length increases, i.e., the number of edges per information bit approaches a finite value as the estimated BP threshold approaches the Shannon limit. We also perform an asymptotic weight enumerator analysis and show that, provided the density parameters are chosen to be sufficiently large, the SC-MN and SC-HA ensembles are asymptotically good. Further, for certain selections of parameters, some of these ensembles are shown to have both excellent thresholds and good distance properties.

MacKay-Neal (MN) and Hsu-Anastasopoulos (HA) low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes are known to achieve the capacity of memoryless binary-input symmetric-output channels under maximum likelihood (ML) decoding with bounded col- umn and row weight in their associated parity-check matrices. Recently, Kasai and Sakaniwa showed that spatially coupled (SC) versions of the MN and HA LDPC codes have belief propagation (BP) iterative decoding thresholds that approach capacity on the binary erasure channel (BEC) as the coupling length increases. In this paper, we extend the results of Kasai and Sakaniwa to the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel and show that the thresholds of the SC-MN and SC-HA ensembles approach capacity with bounded density as the coupling length increases, i.e., the number of edges per information bit approaches a finite value as the estimated BP threshold approaches the Shannon limit. We also perform an asymptotic weight enumerator analysis and show that, provided the density parameters are chosen to be sufficiently large, the SC-MN and SC-HA ensembles are asymptotically good. Further, for certain selections of parameters, some of these ensembles are shown to have both excellent thresholds and good distance properties. (Less)

Several notions of code products are known in quantum error correction, such as hypergraph products, homological products, lifted products, balanced products, to name a few. In this paper we introduce a new product code construction which is a natural generalization of classical product codes to quantum codes: starting from a set of component Calderbank-Shor-Steane (CSS) codes, a larger CSS code is obtained where both X parity checks and Z parity checks are associated to classical product codes. We deduce several properties of product CSS codes from the properties of the component codes, including bounds to the code distance, and show that built-in redundancies in the parity checks result in so-called meta-checks which can be exploited to correct syndrome read-out errors. We then specialize to the case of single-parity-check (SPC) product codes which in the classical domain are a common choice for constructing product codes. Logical error rate simulations of a SPC 3 -fold product CSS code having parameters [[512,174,8]] are shown under both a maximum likelihood decoder for the erasure channel and belief propagation decoding for depolarizing noise. We compare the results with other codes of comparable length and dimension, including a code from the family of asymptotically good Tanner codes. We observe that our reference product CSS code outperforms all the other examined codes.