In classical coding theory, the lift of a code is a practical and natural method for generatingfamilies of LDPC codes from a single chosen input code. This strategy has proven to bevery successful in producing LDPC codes of various blocklengths, reaching good parametersand approaching the capacity of certain channels in the asymptotic regime. It is also nowapplied in the 5G New Radio [RK18].It is widely believed that a quantum computer will integrate a quantum error correctingscheme, and the last three decades have seen the emergence of a variety of code-basedquantum error correction known as CSS codes. It is natural to ask whether we can performlifts of quantum codes, with the hope of having the same benefits as for classical codes.However, the method to lift linear codes cannot be directly applied to quantum CSS codes,as the constituent linear codes usually lose their orthogonality. This dissertation presentsthree new results on lifts of quantum CSS codes.Firstly, we propose a general notion of lift for quantum CSS codes. It is based on theexistence of a canonical complex associated to any CSS code, that we call the Tanner cone-complex, and over which we generate covering spaces. We show that our notion generalizesclassical code lifting and generate important CSS code families. Our main application ofthe lift is to devise new types of quantum CSS codes. So far, most seriously consideredconstructions rely on topology or some kind of product operations. Here, we intend toexplore beyond these paradigmatic ideas and for that we construct new non-topologicaland non-product CSS codes. We then apply the prescription to generate their lifts andshow that this procedure can improve their relative parameters, reaching parameter regionsnot explored prior to this work.Secondly, we introduce new families of quantum Tanner codes, a class of quantum codeswhich first appeared in the work of Leverrier and Zémor [LZ22]. We build these codesby generalizing the lift of classical Tanner codes, based on graph coverings, to the case ofCSS codes, based on coverings of 2D geometrical complexes. We present several explicitfamilies, and identify instances of moderate length quantum codes which are degenerate,have low check weight, and for which the distance is greater than the square root of thecode length.Lastly, we present a topological approach to lifting a quantum CSS code. Our originaldefinition of CSS code lifting was inspired by the work of Freedman and Hastings [FH21],which associates CSS codes with handlebodies. This thesis is a good opportunity to showhow the handlebody realization of a code can also be used to perform code lifting. Weprovide a detailed discussion of why in many cases this is essentially equivalent to ourprevious approach.
In classical coding theory, the lift of a code is a practical and natural method for generatingfamilies of LDPC codes from a single chosen input code. This strategy has proven to bevery successful in producing LDPC codes of various blocklengths, reaching good parametersand approaching the capacity of certain channels in the asymptotic regime. It is also nowapplied in the 5G New Radio [RK18].It is widely believed that a quantum computer will integrate a quantum error correctingscheme, and the last three decades have seen the emergence of a variety of code-basedquantum error correction known as CSS codes. It is natural to ask whether we can performlifts of quantum codes, with the hope of having the same benefits as for classical codes.However, the method to lift linear codes cannot be directly applied to quantum CSS codes,as the constituent linear codes usually lose their orthogonality. This dissertation presentsthree new results on lifts of quantum CSS codes.Firstly, we propose a general notion of lift for quantum CSS codes. It is based on theexistence of a canonical complex associated to any CSS code, that we call the Tanner cone-complex, and over which we generate covering spaces. We show that our notion generalizesclassical code lifting and generate important CSS code families. Our main application ofthe lift is to devise new types of quantum CSS codes. So far, most seriously consideredconstructions rely on topology or some kind of product operations. Here, we intend toexplore beyond these paradigmatic ideas and for that we construct new non-topologicaland non-product CSS codes. We then apply the prescription to generate their lifts andshow that this procedure can improve their relative parameters, reaching parameter regionsnot explored prior to this work.Secondly, we introduce new families of quantum Tanner codes, a class of quantum codeswhich first appeared in the work of Leverrier and Zémor [LZ22]. We build these codesby generalizing the lift of classical Tanner codes, based on graph coverings, to the case ofCSS codes, based on coverings of 2D geometrical complexes. We present several explicitfamilies, and identify instances of moderate length quantum codes which are degenerate,have low check weight, and for which the distance is greater than the square root of thecode length.Lastly, we present a topological approach to lifting a quantum CSS code. Our originaldefinition of CSS code lifting was inspired by the work of Freedman and Hastings [FH21],which associates CSS codes with handlebodies. This thesis is a good opportunity to showhow the handlebody realization of a code can also be used to perform code lifting. Weprovide a detailed discussion of why in many cases this is essentially equivalent to ourprevious approach.
We propose a notion of lift for quantum CSS codes, inspired by the geometrical construction of Freedman and Hastings. It is based on the existence of a canonical complex associated to any CSS code, that we introduce under the name of Tanner cone-complex, and over which we generate covering spaces. As a first application, we describe the classification of lifts of hypergraph product codes (HPC) and demonstrate the equivalence with the lifted product code (LPC) of Panteleev and Kalachev, including when the linear codes, factors of the HPC, are Tanner codes. As a second application, we report several new non-product constructions of quantum CSS codes, and we apply the prescription to generate their lifts which, for certain selected covering maps, are codes with improved relative parameters compared to the initial one.
We present explicit constructions of quantum Tanner (QT) codes with good rate and distance, obtained through two complementary approaches: the left-right Cayley complex (LRCC) description and the "lifting" perspective, in which a seed Calderbank-Shor-Steane (CSS) code is lifted by commuting left-right regular actions of a finite group G. Through an extensive search over non-abelian groups from GAP's SmallGrp library, we investigate the moderate-blocklength regime (n∈[500,1000]) and identify several new code instances with distance upper bounds exceeding 20. These include [[480,8,(≤21,≤21)]], [[504,4,(≤36,≤27)]], [[672,4,(≤48,≤28)]], [[720,6,(≤30,≤30)]], and [[864,8,(≤39,≤31)]], with these bounds obtained using up to 350 million trials of sQetch, a randomized distance estimator. The code instances presented have check weights ranging from 9 to 20. Using the Tesseract decoder, we estimate pseudo-thresholds of 3.6%-4.6% under phenomenological noise and 0.14%-0.27% under circuit-level noise, comparable to prior results at shorter code lengths. We also provide QuantumExpanders.jl, an open-source Julia library for constructing QT codes and explicit constructions of Ramanujan graphs.
We present a topological approach to lifting a quantum CSS code. In previous work, we proposed lifting a CSS code by constructing covering spaces over its 2D simplicial complex representation, known as the Tanner cone-complex. This idea was inspired by the work of Freedman and Hastings, which associates CSS codes with handlebodies. In this paper, we show how the handlebody realization of a code can also be used to perform code lifting, and we provide a more detailed discussion of why this is essentially equivalent to the Tanner cone-complex approach. As an application, we classify lifts of hypergraph-product codes via their handlebody realization.
We introduce new families of quantum Tanner codes, a class of quantum codes that first appeared in the work of Leverrier and Zémor (FOCS 2022). These codes are built from two classical Tanner codes, for which the underlying graphs are extracted from coverings of 2D geometrical complexes, and the local linear codes are tensor-products of cyclic or double-circulant linear codes. The advantage of code lifting is that, for any lift of odd index t of an [[n,k,d]]-code, we can adapt the study of the transfer homomorphism arising in cellular homology to describe symmetries of its logical operators and to establish that its dimension is lower bounded by k, and its distance is upper bounded by t⋅d. Moreover, when the dimension of the lifted code is equal to k, its distance is lower bounded by d. These parameter bounds also apply to the previous methods of code lifting of Guémard (IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, 2025). Finally, We present several explicit families, and identify instances of moderate length quantum codes which are degenerate, have low check weight, and whose distance surpasses the square root of the code length. Among them, we report the existence of a [[96,2,12]]-code whose distance growth saturates our bound, and for which half of the checks are of weight 8 and the other half of weight 4.
Product codes are an important class of quantum error-correcting codes constructed from multiple input codes, which can give rise to asymptotically good quantum low-density parity check codes. In previous work, we showed how the product between two codes can be physically implemented by coupling layers of the first code using checks of the second code. In this work, we further unify product code constructions with coupled-layer constructions of phases of matter by introducing coupled-layer codes. The essential strategy is to condense general excitations created by Pauli operators among multiple decoupled layers of the first code. The condensation is specified by an excitation algebra, which encodes the excitations, along with an algebra-preserving map. This coupling between layers generalizes the notion of gauging in physics as well as the mapping cone in homological algebra, and can be used to produce non-CSS codes. As examples, we show how coupled-layer codes reproduce the X-cube and Chamon models. We further generalize the balanced product code by allowing a unitary transformation in addition to a group action by free permutation and describe its corresponding coupled-layer construction. In particular, we show how balancing by a ZX-duality can reproduce non-CSS codes such as the fermionic toric code and the 3-fermion Walker-Wang model in 3D.
Several notions of code products are known in quantum error correction, such as hypergraph products, homological products, lifted products, balanced products, to name a few. In this paper we introduce a new product code construction which is a natural generalization of classical product codes to quantum codes: starting from a set of component Calderbank-Shor-Steane (CSS) codes, a larger CSS code is obtained where both X parity checks and Z parity checks are associated to classical product codes. We deduce several properties of product CSS codes from the properties of the component codes, including bounds to the code distance, and show that built-in redundancies in the parity checks result in so-called meta-checks which can be exploited to correct syndrome read-out errors. We then specialize to the case of single-parity-check (SPC) product codes which in the classical domain are a common choice for constructing product codes. Logical error rate simulations of a SPC 3 -fold product CSS code having parameters [[512,174,8]] are shown under both a maximum likelihood decoder for the erasure channel and belief propagation decoding for depolarizing noise. We compare the results with other codes of comparable length and dimension, including a code from the family of asymptotically good Tanner codes. We observe that our reference product CSS code outperforms all the other examined codes.