Fault-tolerant quantum computing requires noise-robust architectures that protect quantum information while minimizing overhead. Quantum low-density parity-check (QLDPC) codes are strong candidates because they admit constant-depth error-detection circuits and can achieve optimal asymptotic scaling, yet efficient practical schemes remain an open challenge. This dissertation proposes advances in fault-tolerant protocols based on QLDPC codes to bring them closer to practical realization.
Fault-tolerant quantum computing requires noise-robust architectures that protect quantum information while minimizing overhead. Quantum low-density parity-check (QLDPC) codes are strong candidates because they admit constant-depth error-detection circuits and can achieve optimal asymptotic scaling, yet efficient practical schemes remain an open challenge. This dissertation proposes advances in fault-tolerant protocols based on QLDPC codes to bring them closer to practical realization.
We propose a fault-tolerant quantum computation scheme that is broadly applicable to quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes. The scheme achieves constant qubit overhead and a time overhead of O ( d a + o ( 1 ) ) for any [ [ n , k , d ] ] qLDPC code with constant encoding rate and distance d = Ω ( n 1 / a ) . For good qLDPC codes, the time overhead is minimized and reaches O ( d 1 + o ( 1 ) ) . In contrast, code surgery based on gauging measurement and brute-force branching requires a time overhead of O ( d w 1 + o ( 1 ) ) , where d ≤ w ≤ n . Thus, our scheme is asymptotically faster for all codes with a < 2 . This speedup is achieved by developing techniques that enable parallelized code surgery under constant qubit overhead and leverage classical locally testable codes for efficient resource state preparation. These results establish a new paradigm for accelerating fault-tolerant quantum computation on qLDPC codes, while maintaining low overhead and broad applicability.
The preparation of a quantum state using a noisy quantum computer (gate noise strength δ) will necessarily affect an O(δ)-fraction of the qubits, no matter which protocol is used. Here, we show that fault-tolerant quantum state preparation can be achieved with constant space overhead improving on previous constructions requiring polylogarithmic overhead.
To achieve this, we add to the toolbox of fault-tolerant schemes for circuits with quantum input and output. More specifically, we construct fault-tolerant interfaces that decrease the level of protection for quantum low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. When information is encoded in multiple code blocks, our interfaces have constant space overhead.
In our decoder construction that change the level of protection by an arbitrary amount, we circumvent bottlenecks to error pileup and overhead by gradual lowering of the level of encoding at the same time as we increase the number of blocks on which decoding is carried out simultaneously.
Quantum error correction (QEC) is a cornerstone of quantum computing, enabling reliable information processing in the presence of noise. Sparse stabilizer codes -- referred to generally as quantum low-density parity-check (QLDPC) codes -- have risen to the forefront of QEC research in recent years. This can be attributed to several key factors. First, classical LDPC codes admit low-complexity belief propagation iterative decoding and near-capacity performance, which contributed to the early interest in QLDPC codes. Then, the result promising constant overhead fault tolerance using QLDPC codes led to the search for code families that go beyond the long-holding n scaling barrier of minimum distance for codelength n. This resulted in recent breakthroughs in the construction of QLDPC codes, which, combined with efficient decoding algorithms and the development of fault-tolerant protocols operating on QLDPC-encoded quantum information, provide a promising pathway to low-overhead, fault-tolerant quantum computation. However, despite their potential, challenges remain, particularly in constructing and decoding finite-length codes that account for, or efficiently leverage, specific characteristics of quantum hardware, such as connectivity, topology, native gate sets, and noise models. This article provides an in-depth examination of QLDPC codes and their iterative decoders, catering to an information theory audience with no or limited background in quantum mechanics. We discuss the theoretical underpinnings, explore unique characteristics of quantum channels, and delineate key code constructions and decoding algorithms, ultimately highlighting the impact and future prospects of QLDPC codes in quantum information science.
Fault-tolerant quantum computation traditionally incurs substantial resource overhead, with both qubit and time overheads scaling polylogarithmically with the size of the computation. While prior work by Gottesman showed that constant qubit overhead is achievable under stochastic noise using quantum low-density parity-check (QLDPC) codes, it has remained an open question whether similar guarantees hold under more general, non-stochastic noise models. In this work, we address this question by considering a general circuit-level noise model defined via the diamond norm, which captures both stochastic and non-stochastic noise, including coherent and amplitude damping noise. We prove that constant qubit overhead fault-tolerant quantum computation is achievable in this general setting, using QLDPC codes with constant rate and linear minimum distance. To establish our result, we develop a fault-tolerant error correction scheme and a method for implementing logic gates under general circuit noise. These results extend the theoretical foundations of fault-tolerant quantum computation and offer new directions for fault-tolerant architectures under realistic noise models.
A key appeal of quantum low-density parity check (qLDPC) codes is their ability to suppress stochastic Pauli noise below nonzero thresholds. Coherent errors are fundamentally different: they produce superpositions of error patterns whose amplitudes can interfere even after syndrome measurement. Rigorous understanding of coherent errors remains limited. Here we show that general qLDPC codes admit a nonzero code capacity threshold against local coherent noise and more generally local channel noise. For any family of qLDPC codes with distance d=Ω(logn), we show that there is a constant noise strength below which the logical recovery error in diamond distance decays exponentially with the code distance. The result is established for optimal recovery as well as the minimum-weight decoder. The key technical ingredient is what we call a \emph{cluster resummation}: rather than bounding superposed error configurations one by one, we isolate a large connected error cluster in the channel expansion and exactly resum all errors disconnected from it before taking norms. Standard cluster counting then yields exponential suppression. This work resolves a longstanding challenge in fault tolerance theory, providing general robustness guarantees for qLDPC codes against coherent noise and laying a rigorous foundation for future studies of fault-tolerant quantum technologies.
Quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes can achieve high encoding rates and good code distance scaling, providing a promising route to low-overhead fault-tolerant quantum computing. However, the long-range connectivity required to implement such codes makes their physical realization challenging. Here, we propose a hardware-efficient scheme to perform fault-tolerant quantum computation with high-rate qLDPC codes on reconfigurable atom arrays, directly compatible with recently demonstrated experimental capabilities. Our approach utilizes the product structure inherent in many qLDPC codes to implement the non-local syndrome extraction circuit via atom rearrangement, resulting in effectively constant overhead in practically relevant regimes. We prove the fault tolerance of these protocols, perform circuit-level simulations of memory and logical operations with these codes, and find that our qLDPC-based architecture starts to outperform the surface code with as few as several hundred physical qubits at a realistic physical error rate of 10−3. We further find that less than 3000 physical qubits are sufficient to obtain over an order of magnitude qubit savings compared to the surface code, and quantum algorithms involving thousands of logical qubits can be performed using less than 105 physical qubits. Our work paves the way for explorations of low-overhead quantum computing with qLDPC codes at a practical scale, based on current experimental technologies.