The tradeoff between the quantum coding rate and the associated error correction capability is characterized by the quantum coding bounds. The unique solution for this tradeoff does not exist, but the corresponding lower and the upper bounds can be found in the literature. In this treatise, we survey the existing quantum coding bounds and provide new insights into the classical to quantum duality for the sake of deriving new quantum coding bounds. Moreover, we propose an appealingly simple and invertible analytical approximation, which describes the tradeoff between the quantum coding rate and the minimum distance of quantum stabilizer codes. For example, for a half-rate quantum stabilizer code having a code word length of n = 128, the minimum distance is bounded by 11 <; d <; 22, while our formulation yields a minimum distance of d = 16 for the above-mentioned code. Ultimately, our contributions can be used for the characterization of quantum stabilizer codes.
The tradeoff between the quantum coding rate and the associated error correction capability is characterized by the quantum coding bounds. The unique solution for this tradeoff does not exist, but the corresponding lower and the upper bounds can be found in the literature. In this treatise, we survey the existing quantum coding bounds and provide new insights into the classical to quantum duality for the sake of deriving new quantum coding bounds. Moreover, we propose an appealingly simple and invertible analytical approximation, which describes the tradeoff between the quantum coding rate and the minimum distance of quantum stabilizer codes. For example, for a half-rate quantum stabilizer code having a code word length of n = 128, the minimum distance is bounded by 11 <; d <; 22, while our formulation yields a minimum distance of d = 16 for the above-mentioned code. Ultimately, our contributions can be used for the characterization of quantum stabilizer codes.
The employment of quantum error correction codes (QECCs) within quantum computers potentially offers a reliability improvement for both quantum computation and communications tasks. However, the laws of quantum mechanics prevent us from directly invoking the mature family of classical error correction codes in the quantum domain. In order to circumvent the associated problems, the notion of quantum stabilizer codes (QSCs) was proposed in conjunction with syndrome-based decoding in the quantum regime. However, most of the powerful QSC schemes require long codewords for achieving a high performance, which potentially imposes additional challenges for implementation concerning their implementation, since their decoding may require longer than the quantum circuit's coherence time. Hence at the time of writing, QSCs exhibiting short to moderate codeword lengths are preferable. We commence by describing the pivotal problem encountered by classical error-correction codes, which also emerges when designing the QSCs, namely the intrinsic trade-off between the minimum distance versus coding rate. The complete formulation of this particular trade-off does not exist, but several lower and upper bounds can be found in the literature. It has been shown that a substantial gap can be observed between the upper and lower bound of the minimum distance, given the codeword length and the quantum coding rate. Hence, we propose an appealingly simple and invertible analytical approximation, for characterizing the trade-off between the quantum coding rate and the minimum distance of QSCs as well as their corresponding quantum bit error rate (QBER) performance upper-bound. For example, for a half-rate QSC having a codeword length of n = 128, the minimum distance is bounded by 11 < d < 22, while our approximation yields a minimum distance of d = 17 for the above-mentioned code. Next, we link this parametric study of the minimum distance versus quantum coding rate to the popular QSCs, namely to the family of quantum topological error correction codes (QTECCs). In order to construct the classical-to-quantum isomorphism, we conceive and investigate the family of classical topological error correction codes (TECCs), assuming that the bits of a codeword can be arranged in a lattice structure. We then present the classical-to-quantum isomorphism to pave the way for constructing their dual pairs in the quantum domain, which are the QTECCs. Finally, we characterize the performance of QTECCs in the face of the quantum depolarizing channel in terms of both their QBER and fidelity. Specifically, we demonstrate that for quantum coding rate rQ ~ 0, the threshold probability of the QBER below which the colour, rotated-surface, surface, and toric codes become capable of improving the uncoded QBER are given by 1.8 ×10-2, 1.3 ×10-2, 6.3 ×10-2 and 6.8 ×10-2, respectively. Furthermore, we also demonstrate that we can achieve beneficial fidelity improvements above the minimum fidelity of 0.94, 0.97 and 0.99 by employing the rQ = 1/7 colour code, the rQ = 1/9 rotated-surface code, and the rQ = 1/13 surface code, respectively. However, QSCs require additional quantum gates for their employment. Incorporating more quantum gates for performing error correction potentially introduces further sources of quantum decoherence into quantum computers. In this scenario, the primary challenge is to find the sufficient condition required by each of the quantum gates for beneficially employing QECCs in order to yield reliability improvements, given that the quantum gates utilized by the QECCs also introduce quantum decoherence. In this treatise, we approach this problem by firstly presenting the general framework of protecting quantum gates by the amalgamation of the transversal configuration of quantum gates and QSCs, which can be viewed as syndrome-based QECCs. Secondly, we provide examples of the advocated framework by invoking QTECCs for protecting both transversal Hadamard gates and controlled (CNOT) gates. Both our simulation and analytical results explicitly show that by utilizing QTECCs, the fidelity of the quantum gates can be beneficially improved, provided that quantum gates satisfying a certain minimum depolarization fidelity threshold (Fth) are available. For instance, for protecting transversal Hadamard gates, the minimum fidelity values required for each of the gates in order to attain fidelity improvements are 99.74%, 99.73%, 99.87%, and 99.86%, when they are protected by colour, rotated-surface, surface, and toric codes, respectively. Unfortunately, these specific Fth values can only be obtained for a very large number of physical qubits (n → ∞), when the quantum coding rate of the QTECCs approaches zero (rQ → 0). Finally, in order to conceive QSCs exhibiting a high quantum coding rate, we modify the construction of QTECCs for conceiving a low-complexity concatenated quantum turbocode (QTC). The above-mentioned high quantum coding rate is obtained by combining the quantum-domain version of short-block codes (SBCs) also known as single parity-check (SPC) codes as the outer codes and quantum unity-rate codes (QURCs) as the inner codes. Despite its design simplicity, the proposed QTC yields a near-hashing-bound error correction performance. For instance, compared to the best half-rate QTC known in the literature, namely the quantum irregular convolutional codes (QIrCCs) combined with the QURC scheme, which operates at the distance of D = 0.037 from the quantum hashing bound, our novel QSBC-QURC scheme can operate at the lower distance of D = 0:029. It is also worth mentioning that this is the first instantiation of QTCs capable of adjusting the quantum encoders according to the quantum coding rate required for mitigating the Pauli errors imposed by the time-variant depolarizing probabilities of the quantum channel.
We study the hardness of the problem of finding the distance of quantum error-correcting codes. The analogous problem for classical codes is known to be NP-hard, even in approximate form. For quantum codes, various problems related to decoding are known to be NP-hard, but the hardness of the distance problem has not been studied before. In this work, we show that finding the minimum distance of stabilizer quantum codes exactly or approximately is NP-hard. This result is obtained by reducing the classical minimum distance problem to the quantum problem, using the CWS framework for quantum codes, which constructs a quantum code using a classical code and a graph. A main technical tool used for our result is a lower bound on the so-called graph state distance of 4-cycle free graphs. In particular, we show that for a 4-cycle free graphG, its graph state distance is either$\delta or\delta +1,where\delta istheminimumvertexdegreeofG$. Due to a well-known reduction from stabilizer codes to CSS codes, our results also imply that finding the minimum distance of CSS codes is also NP-hard.
In classical coding theory code concatenation is successfully used to construct good errorcorrecting codes and most of the asymptotically good codes known so far are based on concatenation. In this paper we present some classes of asymptotically good concatenated quantum codes, which are a quantum analogue of classical concatenated codes, and derive lower bounds on the minimum distance and the rate of the codes. Our bounds improve on the best lower bound of Ashikhmin–Litsyn–Tsfasman and Matsumoto for rates smaller than about one half. We also give a polynomial-time decoding algorithm for the codes that can decode up to one fourth of the lower bound on the minimum distance of the codes.
Low check weight is a crucial code property for fault-tolerant quantum computing, which underlies the strong interest in quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes. Here, we initiate the theory of weight-constrained stabilizer codes from various foundational perspectives including the complexity of computing code weight and the explicit boundary of feasible low-weight codes in both theoretical and practical settings. We first prove that computing the optimal generator weight of a stabilizer code is NP-hard, motivating efficiently computable bounds. We derive analytical lower bounds on check weight in terms of code rate and distance, identifying the minimum weights needed for single-qubit error detection and correction, as well as the sharp distance and rate limits of weight-three error-detecting codes. Matching constructions show that these bounds are tight in several regimes. To establish refined finite-size constraints, we develop a linear programming framework based on quantum weight enumerators subject to generator-weight constraints, yielding exact optimal weights for all parameter combinations with n≤9. Finally, we show that the same framework can incorporate architecture-dependent constraints, using the 127-qubit IBM Eagle chip as a concrete example. Our study brings the weight as a crucial parameter into coding theory and provides guidance for code design and utility in practical scenarios.
Linear programming approaches have been applied to derive upper bounds on the size of classical and quantum codes. In this paper, we derive similar results for general quantum codes with entanglement assistance by considering a type of split weight enumerator. After deriving the MacWilliams identities for these enumerators, we are able to prove algebraic linear programming bounds, such as the Singleton bound, the Hamming bound, and the first linear programming bound. Our Singleton bound and Hamming bound are more general than the previous bounds for entanglement-assisted quantum stabilizer codes. In addition, we show that the first linear programming bound improves the Hamming bound when the relative distance is sufficiently large. On the other hand, we obtain additional constraints on the size of Pauli subgroups for quantum codes, which allow us to improve the linear programming bounds on the minimum distance of quantum codes of small length. In particular, we show that there is no [[27, 15, 5]] or [[28, 14, 6]] stabilizer code. We also discuss the existence of some entanglement-assisted quantum stabilizer codes with maximal entanglement. As a result, the upper and lower bounds on the minimum distance of maximal-entanglement quantum stabilizer codes with length up to 20 are significantly improved.
Hardness of Approximating Quantum Code Distance Beyond N
We study the computational complexity of approximating the minimum distance of a stabilizer code. Classically, the minimum distance problem is NP-hard to approximate even to within an additive gap linear in the block length. For quantum codes, however, the reductions of Kapshikar and Kundu and of Grigorescu, Jha and Samperton reach only an additive O(N) gap in the block length N. We close this gap and, in a separate direction, initiate the fine-grained study of the problem.
We show that no randomized algorithm approximates the distance to within an additive αN, for a constant α>0, unless NP⊆coRP. In the fine-grained setting, for every ε>0, no randomized 2(1−ε)κpoly(N)-time algorithm computes the distance of a code with κ logical qubits unless SETH falls; and no randomized 2o(N)-time algorithm approximates the distance to within a linear additive gap, on instances where block length, number of logical qubits, and gap are simultaneously linear, unless non-uniform Gap-ETH falls.