The first linear-distance quantum LDPC codes were recently constructed by a line of breakthrough works (culminating in the result of Panteleev & Kalachev, 2021). All such constructions, even when allowing for almost-linear distance, are based on an operation called a balanced (or lifted) product, which is used in a one-shot manner to combine a pair of large classical codes possessing a group symmetry. We present a new construction of almost-linear distance quantum LDPC codes that is iterative in nature. Our construction is based on a more basic and widely used product, namely the homological product (i.e. the tensor product of chain complexes). Specifically, for every ε > 0, we obtain a family of [[N,N^{1-ε},N^{1-ε}]] (subsystem) quantum LDPC codes via repeated homological products of a constant-sized quantum locally testable code. Our key idea is to remove certain low-weight codewords using subsystem codes (while still maintaining constant stabilizer weight), in order to circumvent a particular obstruction that limited the distance of many prior homological product code constructions to at most Õ(√N).
The first linear-distance quantum LDPC codes were recently constructed by a line of breakthrough works (culminating in the result of Panteleev & Kalachev, 2021). All such constructions, even when allowing for almost-linear distance, are based on an operation called a balanced (or lifted) product, which is used in a one-shot manner to combine a pair of large classical codes possessing a group symmetry. We present a new construction of almost-linear distance quantum LDPC codes that is iterative in nature. Our construction is based on a more basic and widely used product, namely the homological product (i.e. the tensor product of chain complexes). Specifically, for every ε > 0, we obtain a family of [[N,N^{1-ε},N^{1-ε}]] (subsystem) quantum LDPC codes via repeated homological products of a constant-sized quantum locally testable code. Our key idea is to remove certain low-weight codewords using subsystem codes (while still maintaining constant stabilizer weight), in order to circumvent a particular obstruction that limited the distance of many prior homological product code constructions to at most Õ(√N).
The first linear-distance quantum LDPC codes were recently constructed by a line of breakthrough works (culminating in the result of Panteleev & Kalachev, 2021). All such constructions, even when allowing for almost-linear distance, are based on an operation called a balanced (or lifted) product, which is used in a one-shot manner to combine a pair of large classical codes possessing a group symmetry. We present a new construction of almost-linear distance quantum LDPC codes that is iterative in nature. Our construction is based on a more basic and widely used product, namely the homological product (i.e. the tensor product of chain complexes). Specifically, for every ε > 0, we obtain a family of [[N,N^{1-ε},N^{1-ε}]] (subsystem) quantum LDPC codes via repeated homological products of a constant-sized quantum locally testable code. Our key idea is to remove certain low-weight codewords using subsystem codes (while still maintaining constant stabilizer weight), in order to circumvent a particular obstruction that limited the distance of many prior homological product code constructions to at most Õ(√N).
Quantum codes with low-weight stabilizers known as LDPC codes have been actively studied recently due to their simple syndrome readout circuits and potential applications in fault-tolerant quantum computing. However, all families of quantum LDPC codes known to this date suffer from a poor distance scaling limited by the square-root of the code length. This is in a sharp contrast with the classical case where good families of LDPC codes are known that combine constant encoding rate and linear distance. Here we propose the first family of good quantum codes with low-weight stabilizers. The new codes have a constant encoding rate, linear distance, and stabilizers acting on at most n qubits, where n is the code length. For comparison, all previously known families of good quantum codes have stabilizers of linear weight. Our proof combines two techniques: randomized constructions of good quantum codes and the homological product operation from algebraic topology. We conjecture that similar methods can produce good stabilizer codes with stabilizer weight na for any a>0. Finally, we apply the homological product to construct new small codes with low-weight stabilizers.
Quantum codes with low-weight stabilizers known as LDPC codes have been actively studied recently due to their potential applications in fault-tolerant quantum computing. However, all families of quantum LDPC codes known to this date suffer from a poor distance scaling limited by the square-root of the code length. This is in a sharp contrast with the classical case where good families of LDPC codes are known that combine constant encoding rate and linear distance. Here we propose the first family of good quantum codes with low-weight stabilizers. The new codes have a constant encoding rate, linear distance, and stabilizers acting on at most O(√n) qubits, where n is the code length. For comparison, all previously known families of good quantum codes have stabilizers of linear weight. Our proof combines two techniques: randomized constructions of good quantum codes and the homological product operation from algebraic topology. We conjecture that similar methods can produce good stabilizer codes with stabilizer weight O(nα) for any α > 0.
For an abelian group H acting on the set [𝓁], an (H,𝓁)-lift of a graph G₀ is a graph obtained by replacing each vertex by 𝓁 copies, and each edge by a matching corresponding to the action of an element of H. Expanding graphs obtained via abelian lifts, form a key ingredient in the recent breakthrough constructions of quantum LDPC codes, (implicitly) in the fiber bundle codes by Hastings, Haah and O'Donnell [STOC 2021] achieving distance Ω̃(N^{3/5}), and in those by Panteleev and Kalachev [IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 2021] of distance Ω(N/log(N)). However, both these constructions are non-explicit. In particular, the latter relies on a randomized construction of expander graphs via abelian lifts by Agarwal et al. [SIAM J. Discrete Math 2019]. In this work, we show the following explicit constructions of expanders obtained via abelian lifts. For every (transitive) abelian group H ⩽ Sym(𝓁), constant degree d ≥ 3 and ε > 0, we construct explicit d-regular expander graphs G obtained from an (H,𝓁)-lift of a (suitable) base n-vertex expander G₀ with the following parameters: ii) λ(G) ≤ 2√{d-1} + ε, for any lift size 𝓁 ≤ 2^{n^{δ}} where δ = δ(d,ε), iii) λ(G) ≤ ε ⋅ d, for any lift size 𝓁 ≤ 2^{n^{δ₀}} for a fixed δ₀ > 0, when d ≥ d₀(ε), or iv) λ(G) ≤ Õ(√d), for lift size "exactly" 𝓁 = 2^{Θ(n)}. As corollaries, we obtain explicit quantum lifted product codes of Panteleev and Kalachev of almost linear distance (and also in a wide range of parameters) and explicit classical quasi-cyclic LDPC codes with wide range of circulant sizes. Items (i) and (ii) above are obtained by extending the techniques of Mohanty, O'Donnell and Paredes [STOC 2020] for 2-lifts to much larger abelian lift sizes (as a byproduct simplifying their construction). This is done by providing a new encoding of special walks arising in the trace power method, carefully "compressing" depth-first search traversals. Result (iii) is via a simpler proof of Agarwal et al. [SIAM J. Discrete Math 2019] at the expense of polylog factors in the expansion.
We give a construction of quantum LDPC codes of dimensionΘ(logN)and distanceΘ(N/logN)as the code length$N\to \infty .UsingaproductofchaincomplexesthisconstructionalsoprovidesafamilyofquantumLDPCcodesofdistance\Omega (N^{1-\alpha /2}/\log N)anddimension\Omega (N^\alpha \log N)$, where0≤α<1. We also introduce and study a new operation called lifted product, which naturally generalizes the product operations for quantum codes and chain complexes. Moreover, as a simple byproduct of our results on quantum codes, we obtain a new result on classical codes. We show that for any fixedR<1there exists an asymptotically good family of classical quasi-cyclic LDPC codes of rate at leastRwith, in some sense, optimal circulant sizeΩ(N/logN)as the code length$N\to \infty $.
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.