Executing a logical quantum circuit fault-tolerantly incurs a large spacetime overhead. Recent work has proposed and investigated phantom codes, defined by the property that every in-block logical
CNOT circuit can be implemented with a physical permutation, a property that has the potential to greatly reduce the depth of compiled circuits. Here we show that phantomness comes at the cost of low encoding rate. Specifically, we prove that any binary phantom code encoding
k logical qubits into
n physical qubits with distance
d≥2 obeys the bound
k≤log2(n+1) for all
k=4. For
k=4 we explicitly construct a nonstabiliser
((8,24,2)) phantom code that violates the bound and has a transversal non-Clifford gate. We further show that, within the class of nontrivial CSS phantom codes with
k=4, there is a unique family of codes saturating this bound. In addition, we prove that this logarithmic ceiling cannot be circumvented by permitting additional local unitary gates, or by making use of subsystem codes: any subspace or subsystem code admitting a
SWAP-transversal implementation of every logical
CNOT circuit is constrained to satisfy the same bound. These bounds follow from a general theorem relating the length of a quantum code to the structure of its automorphism group, a result which may find applications beyond phantom codes.
Fault-tolerant logical entangling gates are essential for scalable quantum computing, but are limited by the error rates and overheads of physical two-qubit gates and measurements. To address this limitation, we introduce phantom codes-quantum error-correcting codes that realize entangling gates between all logical qubits in a code block purely through relabelling of physical qubits during compilation, yielding perfect fidelity with no spatial or temporal overhead. We present a systematic study of such codes. First, we identify phantom codes using complementary numerical and analytical approaches. We exhaustively enumerate all
2.71×1010 inequivalent CSS codes up to
n=14 and identify additional instances up to
n=21 via SAT-based methods. We then construct higher-distance phantom-code families using quantum Reed-Muller codes and the binarization of qudit codes. Across all identified codes, we characterize other supported fault-tolerant logical Clifford and non-Clifford operations. Second, through end-to-end noisy simulations with state preparation, full QEC cycles, and realistic physical error rates, we demonstrate scalable advantages of phantom codes over the surface code across multiple tasks. We observe a one-to-two order-of-magnitude reduction in logical infidelity at comparable qubit overhead for GHZ-state preparation and Trotterized many-body simulation tasks, given a modest preselection acceptance rate. Our work establishes phantom codes as a viable architectural route to fault-tolerant quantum computation with scalable benefits for workloads with dense local entangling structure, and introduces general tools for systematically exploring the broader landscape of quantum error-correcting codes.
Logical entangling gates are a major source of physical spacetime overhead in fault-tolerant quantum computation. Phantom codes reduce this cost by implementing every ordered in-block logical CNOT through physical qubit permutations and Pauli-frame updates. Whether this mechanism can coexist with the low-weight stabilizer structure of qLDPC codes is a central question for low-overhead fault-tolerant architectures. We give a deterministic answer within binary CSS hypergraph product (HGP) codes. Up to natural equivalences, the simplex-repetition family is the unique HGP family satisfying the phantom condition. We then evaluate this family under circuit-level noise in logical GHZ-state preparation and Trotterized many-body quantum simulation. The codes retain low-weight stabilizer checks and yield concrete advantages over rotated surface-code baselines in both benchmarks. Reconfigurable neutral-atom arrays offer a natural setting for this approach, supporting nonlocal qLDPC operations while enabling in-block logical CNOTs without additional physical operations. Together, these results make precise how permutation-based logical entangling constrains code design within the HGP framework, demonstrate the circuit-level benefits of the unique family, and guide the search for phantom qLDPC families with better asymptotic parameters for low-overhead fault tolerance on neutral-atom hardware.
Quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes can be implemented by measuring only low-weight checks, making them compatible with noisy quantum hardware and central to the quest to build noise-resilient quantum computers. A fundamental open question is how constraints on check weight limit the achievable parameters of qLDPC codes. Here, we study stabilizer and subsystem codes with constrained check weight, combining analytical arguments with numerical optimization to establish strong upper bounds on their parameters. We show that stabilizer codes with checks of weight at most three cannot have nontrivial distance. We also prove tight tradeoffs between rate and distance for broad families of CSS stabilizer and subsystem codes with checks of weight at most four and two, respectively. Notably, our bounds are applicable to general qLDPC codes, as they rely only on check-weight constraints without assuming geometric locality or special graph connectivity. In the finite-size regime, we derive numerical upper bounds using linear programming techniques and identify explicit code constructions that approach these limits, delineating the landscape of practically relevant qLDPC codes with tens or hundreds of physical qubits.
The realization of quantum error correction protocols whose logical error rates are suppressed far below physical error rates relies on an intricate combination: the error-correcting code's efficiency, the syndrome extraction circuit's fault tolerance and overhead, the decoder's quality, and the device's constraints, such as physical qubit count and connectivity. This work makes two contributions towards error-corrected quantum devices. First, we introduce mirror codes, a simple yet flexible construction of LDPC stabilizer codes parameterized by a group
G and two subsets of
G whose total size bounds the check weight. These codes contain all abelian two-block group algebra codes, such as bivariate bicycle (BB) codes. At the same time, they are manifestly not CSS in general, thus deviating substantially from most prior constructions. Fixing a check weight of 6, we find
[[60,4,10]],[[36,6,6]],[[48,8,6]], and
[[85,8,9]] codes, all of which are not CSS; we also find several weight-7 codes with
kd>n.
Next, we construct syndrome extraction circuits that trade overhead for provable fault tolerance. These circuits use 1-2, 3, and 6 ancillae per check, and respectively are partially fault-tolerant (FT), provably FT on weight-6 CSS codes, and provably FT on \emph{all} weight-6 stabilizer codes. Using our constructions, we perform end-to-end quantum memory experiments on several representative mirror codes under circuit-level noise. We achieve an error pseudothreshold on the order of
0.2%, approximately matching that of the
[[144,12,12]] BB code under the same model. These findings position mirror codes as a versatile candidate for fault-tolerant quantum memory, especially on smaller-scale devices in the near term.
The major challenge on the way to fault-tolerant quantum computing comes from the insufficient quality of hardware components and the difficulty of scaling their number without further compromising fidelity. Quantum Low-Density Parity-Check (qLDPC) codes offer a promising solution by encoding logical qubits with low overhead and at a comparatively high code distance. However, it remains an open question how to scalably implement efficient qLDPC codes on fixed-connectivity quantum chips without increasing hardware complexity to enable the non-local interactions in their underlying QEC cycles. We resolve this challenge for the first time by introducing a family of qLDPC "barbell" codes accompanied by a realistic chip layout that natively supports all required two-qubit interactions. Crucially, the hardware complexity required to implement barbell codes remains constant as code distance increases. We provide a detailed investigation into the feasibility of all required hardware components and simulate a specific family of barbell codes against circuit-level noise. We find that, with a modest overhead of
<30 data qubits per logical qubit, barbell codes can preserve information at a physical noise strength of
10−4 for several trillion QEC cycles. Simulations of logical multi-Pauli measurements, performed with circuits tailored to the chip, yield similar logical performance per QEC round, indicating that entangling gates between logical qubits in barbell codes can be realized fault-tolerantly.