Towards practical quantum LDPC codes

Kenta Kasai, Kenta Kasai

Louis Golowich, Venkatesan Guruswami

Quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes are an important component in the quest for quantum fault tolerance. Dramatic recent progress on qLDPC codes has led to constructions which are asymptotically good, and which admit linear-time decoders to correct errors affecting a constant fraction of codeword qubits. These constructions, while theoretically explicit, rely on inner codes with strong properties only shown to exist by probabilistic arguments, resulting in lengths that are too large to be practically relevant. In practice, the surface/toric codes, which are the product of two repetition codes, are still often the qLDPC codes of choice. A previous construction of qLDPC codes based on the lifted product of an expander-based classical LDPC code with a repetition code (Panteleev and Kalachev, 2020) achieved a near-linear distance, and avoids the need for such intractable inner codes. Our main result is an efficient decoding algorithm for these codes that corrects a near-linear number of adversarial errors. En route, we give a similar algorithm for the hypergraph product version these codes, which are simpler but have distance growing only as the square root of the block length. Our decoding algorithms leverage the fact that the codes we consider are quasi-cyclic, meaning that they respect a cyclic group symmetry. Since the repetition code is not based on expanders, previous approaches to decoding expander-based qLDPC codes, which typically worked by greedily flipping code bits to reduce some potential function, do not apply in our setting. Instead, we reduce our decoding problem (in a black-box manner) to that of decoding classical expander-based LDPC codes under noisy parity-check syndromes. For completeness, we also include a treatment of such classical noisy-syndrome decoding that is sufficient for our application to the quantum setting.

Alessio Baldelli, Massimo Battaglioni, Jonathan Mandelbaum +2 more

Quantum low-density parity-check (QLDPC) codes provide a practical balance between error-correction capability and implementation complexity in quantum error correction (QEC). In this paper, we propose an algebraic construction based on dyadic matrices for designing both classical and quantum LDPC codes. The method first generates classical binary quasi-dyadic LDPC codes whose Tanner graphs have girth 6. It is then extended to the Calderbank-Shor-Steane (CSS) framework, where the two component parity-check matrices are built to satisfy the compatibility condition required by the recently introduced CAMEL-ensemble quaternary belief propagation decoder. This compatibility condition ensures that all unavoidable cycles of length 4 are assembled in a single variable node, allowing the mitigation of their detrimental effects by decimating that variable node.

Jungmin Cho, Hyeonseong Jeong, Junpyo Kim +3 more

Fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC) uses quantum error correction (QEC) codes to execute large-scale quantum programs on noisy quantum computers. Quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes are promising as they use an order of magnitude fewer qubits than widely used surface codes. However, as qLDPC codes support only a limited set of operations, they require programs to be decomposed into many qLDPC-supported operations. This prohibitively increases the execution time of FTQC applications to tens of days, hindering the practical viability of qLDPC codes.

Kenta Kasai

Koki Okada, Kouki OKADA, Kenta Kasai