We derive a relationship between two different notions of fidelity (entanglement fidelity and average fidelity) for a completely depolarizing quantum channel. This relationship gives rise to a quantum analog of the MacWilliams identities in classical coding theory. These identities relate the weight enumerator of a code to the one of its dual and, with linear programming techniques, provided a powerful tool to investigate the possible existence of codes. The same techniques can be adapted to the quantum case. We give examples of their power.
In 1997, Shor and Laflamme defined the weight enumerators for quantum error-correcting codes and derived a MacWilliams identity. We extend their work by introducing our double weight enumerators and complete weight enumerators for qubit codes and then investigate the MacWilliams identities for these enumerators. Based on the generalized MacWilliams identities, we solve an open problem, namely, the Singleton-type bound for asymmetric quantum codes (AQCs). Besides, the Hamming-type and the first linear-programming-type bounds for the AQCs are deduced similarly.
This paper develops a MacWilliams-type enumerator theory and semidefinite programming bounds for intrinsic quantum codes. An intrinsic code is a subspace
C⊂V of a finite-dimensional unitary representation
V of a group
G, with errors organized into the isotypic components of
L(V) under conjugation. The Knill-Laflamme conditions persist under every
G-equivariant realization of
V, aallowing intrinsic bounds to apply across diverse physical encodings. Without a group action, we first construct projector and twirl quadratic enumerators for an arbitrary orthogonal decomposition of
L(V), analogous respectively to the
A and
B enumerators of Shor-Laflamme theory. These enumerators satisfy positivity, normalization, and Knill-Laflamme inequalities, but the two superoperator families need not span the same space and therefore admit no canonical duality. A group action places their generalized versions in the same equivariant intertwiner algebra, and the change of basis between them defines the intrinsic MacWilliams transform. When the conjugation representation has multiplicities, this algebra is noncommutative and the enumerators are matrix-valued; positivity and detection are encoded by Loewner-order constraints, making the natural programming bound a semidefinite program. The multiplicity-free specialization recovers the known scalar MacWilliams transform and linear-programming framework. For symmetric powers, intrinsic depth equals ordinary qudit distance, yielding extremality certificates for permutation-invariant qudit codes. Finally, for the
27-dimensional
SU(3) representation
V=(2,2), an exact dual certificate proves the sharp bound
K≤5 for codes detecting the full adjoint isotypic component. An explicit
5-dimensional code attains the bound and, under the canonical embedding, gives a four-qutrit distance-
2 code.
In a recent paper, Shor and Laflamme (see Phys. Rev. Lett., vol.78, p.1600-2, 1997) defined two "weight enumerators" for quantum error-correcting codes, connected by a MacWilliams transform, and used them to give a linear programming bound for quantum codes. We introduce two new enumerators which, while much less powerful at producing bounds, are useful tools nonetheless. The new enumerators are connected by a much simpler duality transform, clarifying the duality between Shor and Laflamme's enumerators. We also use the new enumerators to give a simpler condition for a quantum code to have specified minimum distance, and to extend the enumerator theory to codes with block size greater than 2.
Abstract—The dual of an entanglement-assisted quantum error-correcting (EAQEC) code is the code resulting from ex-changing the original code’s information qubits for its ebits and vice versa. As an introduction to this notion, we show how entanglement-assisted repetition codes and entanglement-assisted accumulator codes are dual to each other, much like their classical counterparts, and we give an explicit, general quantum shift-register circuit that encodes both classes of codes. We later show that our constructions are optimal, and this result completes our understanding of these dual classes of codes. We obtain linear programming bounds for EAQEC codes, by exploiting general forms of these dualities and corresponding MacWilliams identities. We establish the Gilbert-Varshamov bound and the Plotkin bound for EAQEC codes, and all of these bounds allow us to formulate a table of upper and lower bounds on the minimum distance of any maximal-entanglement EAQEC code with length up to 15 channel qubits. Finally, we provide an upper bound on the block error probability when transmitting maximal-entanglement EAQEC codes through the depolarizing channel. Index Terms—quantum dual code, entanglement-assisted quantum error correction, MacWilliams identity, linear programming bound, entanglement-assisted repetition codes, entanglement-assisted accumulator codes I.