We consider the probability of decoding error, equivalently the fidelity, of finite length quantum codes assuming quantum information transmission via qubit erasure channel. First, we obtain an analytical expression on this probability via combinatorial invariants of quantum codes. Next, we derive a generalization of the MacWilliams identities for those invariants and use them to formulate a linear programming optimization problem, which allows us to obtain lower bounds on the number of unrecoverable sets of i erasures and the probability of decoding error. Our example shows that the obtain bounds can be very tight. Next, we derive upper (achievability) bounds on the probability of decoding error for finite length stabilizer and CSS codes. CSS codes have many advantages for practical applications. Our results show that CSS codes of small lengths, like 100 qubits, visibly lose in performance to generic stabilizer codes.
We consider the probability of decoding error, equivalently the fidelity, of finite length quantum codes assuming quantum information transmission via qubit erasure channel. First, we obtain an analytical expression on this probability via combinatorial invariants of quantum codes. Next, we derive a generalization of the MacWilliams identities for those invariants and use them to formulate a linear programming optimization problem, which allows us to obtain lower bounds on the number of unrecoverable sets of i erasures and the probability of decoding error. Our example shows that the obtain bounds can be very tight. Next, we derive upper (achievability) bounds on the probability of decoding error for finite length stabilizer and CSS codes. CSS codes have many advantages for practical applications. Our results show that CSS codes of small lengths, like 100 qubits, visibly lose in performance to generic stabilizer codes.
Abstract We compute the n-shot classical capacity of the quantum erasure channel, providing upper bounds and almost-matching lower bounds for it, the latter achievable via large-minimum-distance classical linear codes for any n. The protocols are in full product form, i.e. no entanglement is needed either at the encoder or decoder to attain the capacity, and they explicitly adapt to the transition between different error regimes as the erasure probability increases. Finally, we show that our upper and lower bounds on the capacity are tighter than those obtainable from the general theory of finite-size capacity via generalized divergences.
We analyze the performance of quantum stabilizer codes, one of the most important classes for practical implementations, on both symmetric and asymmetric quantum channels. To this aim, we first derive the weight enumerator (WE) for the undetectable errors based on the quantum MacWilliams identities. The WE is then used to evaluate tight upper bounds on the error rate of CSS quantum codes with minimum weight decoding. For surface codes we also derive a simple closed form expression of the bounds over the depolarizing channel. We introduce a novel approach that combines the knowledge of WE with a logical operator analysis, allowing the derivation of the exact asymptotic error rate for short codes. For example, on a depolarizing channel with physical error rate ρ → 0 , the logical error rate ρ L is asymptotically ρ L ≈ 16 ρ 2 for the [ [ 9 , 1 , 3 ] ] Shor code, ρ L ≈ 16.3 ρ 2 for the [ [ 7 , 1 , 3 ] ] Steane code, ρ L ≈ 18.7 ρ 2 for the [ [ 13 , 1 , 3 ] ] surface code, and ρ L ≈ 149.3 ρ 3 for the [ [ 41 , 1 , 5 ] ] surface code. For larger codes our bound provides ρ L ≈ 1215 ρ 4 and ρ L ≈ 663 ρ 5 for the [ [ 85 , 1 , 7 ] ] and the [ [ 181 , 1 , 10 ] ] surface codes, respectively. Finally, we extend our analysis to include realistic, noisy syndrome extraction circuits by modeling error propagation throughout gadgets. This enables estimation of logical error rates under faulty measurements. The performance analysis serves as a design tool for developing fault-tolerant quantum systems by guiding the selection of quantum codes based on their error correction capability. Additionally, it offers a novel perspective on quantum degeneracy, showing it represents the fraction of non-correctable error patterns shared by multiple logical operators.
In this work, we derive achievability (upper) bounds for the logical error probability (LEP) of finite-length CSS codes for two asymmetric channels. In other words, we prove the existence of [[n, k]] CSS codes whose LEP does not exceed certain bounds that depend on the code and channel parameters. The bounds are derived with the help of finding the average LEPs of CSS codes from different code ensembles.The obtained bounds allow us to optimize code parameters for specific quantum channels. We show that such optimization leads to drastic performance improvements in asymmetric channels. We further show that expurgating bad codes from the ensemble of all CSS codes also leads to large performance improvements in certain channels.
The extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) and generalized EXIT (GEXIT) area theorems provide fundamental conservation laws that connect the rate of classical codes to the performance of maximum-a-posteriori decoding on binary memoryless channels. In this work, we generalize these area theorems to quantum error correction. We first develop a coset-entropy formalism for nested linear codes, where the message specifies a coset and encoder randomization selects a codeword within that coset. The area under the resulting coset (G)EXIT function equals the normalized dimension of the quotient. For stabilizer codes, the measured syndrome restricts the Pauli error but does not always determine its logical effect, and the remaining uncertainty is an entropy over logical correction classes. We show that this entropy equals a classical coset entropy associated with the stabilizer group and the Pauli operators that commute with it. The resulting quantum GEXIT function has area equal to the number of encoded qubits per channel use for any stabilizer code, and this applies to the depolarizing channel through its joint four-valued Pauli-error distribution. For CSS codes on the quantum erasure channel and under independent bit- and phase-flip noise, the logical correction problem separates into two binary coset-decoding problems. On the quantum erasure channel, the duality between the stabilizer group and the Pauli operators that commute with it gives a folding identity at complementary erasure probabilities. Using this and the area theorem, we derive an upper bound on the rate of code families with vanishing logical error probability that matches the capacity of the quantum erasure channel. For the depolarizing channel, we also derive a rate-dependent converse, using a connection between correction-class entropy and coherent information to establish an inequality involving the complementary channel.
We determine the optimal success probability for transmitting a fixed number of classical messages through a finite number of uses of the quantum erasure channel, assisted by noiseless classical feedback and without initial shared entanglement. For an input dimension d, an erasure probability p, a blocklength n, and M equiprobable messages, the optimal success probability is equal to E[min{1,dK/M}], where K is binomial with parameters n and 1−p. The converse allows arbitrary adaptive quantum encoders, quantum memories, and receiver instruments. Its main ingredient is an elementary dimension bound for noiseless quantum communication with classical feedback, proved by fixing the classical controls without conditioning the sender's state on the observed transcript. A classical protocol that transmits the base-d digits of an integer representing the message, repeating each digit until the receiver acknowledges its reception or the prescribed blocklength is reached, attains the bound for every integer M. We also establish a relative-majorization property of erasure-channel outputs and exactly evaluate a hypothesis-testing converse, recovering the same numerical bound without feedback. That converse need not be achievable without feedback: four uses of the qubit erasure channel and four messages give a strict gap. A product-state code employing tetrahedral qubit states nevertheless outperforms every classical binary erasure code with these parameters. We give an explicit message-size formula and show that the bounded-remainder normal approximation and the average-success strong-converse exponent are unchanged without feedback. We also determine the feedback-assisted error exponent below capacity, prove that it agrees with the no-feedback exponent above a critical rate, and give no-feedback bounds at lower rates.
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.