Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Log inSign up
Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Blog
Job Board
Q3AS

© 2026 Aqora Quantum S.A.S.

TermsPrivacyLegal Notice

Study of Quantum LDPC Codes and their Decoding

Wouter Rozendaal

Published Dec 2, 2025• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Quantum Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) codes provide a promising solution to protect quantum information from errors and are therefore considered an important step in the realisation of a fullscale fault-tolerant quantum computer. In this thesis, we study quantum LDPC codes under three different approaches, providing insights into renormalisation decoding for Kitaev’s toric code, establishing bounds on the minimum distance of geometrically-local codes, and constructing small instances of quantum Tanner codes. Kitaev’s toric code is a prominent quantum LDPC code that is currently the most widely pursued for experimental implementation. We focus on the probabilistic renormalisation decoders introduced by Duclos- Cianci and Poulin, a family of decoders that exhibit one of the best trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency. We study how they handle adversarial errors by introducing a deterministic renormalisation decoder that does not use a priori probabilities of the error model. We find that this renormalisation decoder allows for fractal-like uncorrectable error patterns, and we obtain a lower bound on the weight of such errors. Due to physical constraints, a lot of attention has gone into quantum LDPC codes whose stabilisers act only on a limited number of nearby qubits. We extend the well-known Bravyi-Terhal bound to quantum codes defined by local constraints on a lattice quotient, providing a crucial insight into the limitations of geometrically-local stabiliser codes. As an application, we provide upper bounds on the minimum distance of Abelian Two-Block Group Algebra codes, a family of quantum LDPC codes for which the minimum distance is currently unknown. In recent years, asymptotically good quantum LDPC codes were constructed, but provable results on their minimum distances only apply to impractically long codes. Following the effort in the design of near-term implementable codes, we construct short instances of quantum Tanner codes using square complexes obtained from lifted products of regular graphs. Several explicit instances of these codes exhibit minimum distances surpassing the square root of the code length.

DOI
10.70675/f66f43cez8153z479czbfb6z0657c45fd040

Related papers

A Worst-Case Analysis of a Renormalisation Decoder for Kitaev’s Toric Code

Wouter Rozendaal, Gilles Zémor

Kitaev's toric code is arguably the most studied quantum code and is expected to be implemented in future generations of quantum computers. The renormalisation decoders introduced by Duclos-Cianci and Poulin exhibit one of the best trade-offs between efficiency and speed, but one question that was left open is how they handle worst-case or adversarial errors, i.e. what is the order of magnitude of the smallest weight of an error pattern that will be wrongly decoded. We initiate such a study involving a simple hard-decision and deterministic version of a renormalisation decoder. We exhibit an uncorrectable error pattern whose weight scales like d1/2and prove that the decoder corrects all error patterns of weight less than $\frac{5}{6}{d^{{{\log }_2}(6/5)}}$, where d is the minimum distance of the toric code.

IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT)•Jun 25, 2023•1 citation

Decoding Quasi-Cyclic Quantum LDPC Codes

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.

arXiv:2411.04464•Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science•Oct 27, 2024•1 citation

Analysis of the Error-Correcting Radius of a Renormalisation Decoder for Kitaev's Toric Code

Wouter Rozendaal, Gilles Zémor

Kitaev's toric code is arguably the most studied quantum code and is expected to be implemented in future generations of quantum computers. The renormalisation decoders introduced by Duclos-Cianci and Poulin exhibit one of the best trade-offs between efficiency and speed, but one question that was left open is how they handle worst-case or adversarial errors, i.e. what is the order of magnitude of the smallest weight of an error pattern that will be wrongly decoded. We initiate such a study involving a simple hard-decision and deterministic version of a renormalisation decoder. We exhibit an uncorrectable error pattern whose weight scales like $d^{1/2}$ and prove that the decoder corrects all error patterns of weight less than $\frac{5}{6} d^{\log_{2}(6/5)}$, where $d$ is the minimum distance of the toric code.

arXiv:2309.12165•Sep 21, 2023•0 citations

Study of Quantum LDPC Codes and their Decoding

Wouter Rozendaal

Étude de codes LDPC quantiques et de leur décodage Les codes quantiques de type LDPC (Low-Density Parity-Check, à matrice de parité creuse) offrent une solution prometteuse pour protéger l’information quantique contre les erreurs et sont donc considérés comme une étape importante dans la réalisation à grande échelle d’un ordinateur quantique tolérant aux fautes. Dans cette thèse, nous étudions les codes LDPC quantiques selon trois approches différentes, en analysant le décodage par renormalisation du code torique de Kitaev, en établissant des limites sur la distance minimale des codes géométriquement locaux et en construisant de petits exemples de codes de Tanner quantiques. Le code torique de Kitaev est un code LDPC quantique remarquable et est actuellement le plus largement considéré pour une mise en œuvre expérimentale. Nous examinons les décodeurs par renormalisation probabiliste introduits par Duclos-Cianci et Poulin, une famille de décodeurs qui offrent l’un des meilleurs compromis entre précision et rapidité. Nous étudions la manière dont ils gèrent les erreurs adverses en introduisant un décodeur par renormalisation déterministe, n’utilisant pas les probabilités a priori du modèle d’erreur. Nous constatons que ce décodeur par renormalisation admet des motifs d’erreurs incorrigibles de type fractal et nous obtenons une borne inférieure sur le poids de ces erreurs. En raison de contraintes physiques, une grande attention a été accordée aux codes LDPC quantiques dont les stabilisateurs n’agissent que sur un nombre limité de qubits voisins. Nous étendons la fameuse borne de Bravyi-Terhal aux codes quantiques définis par des contraintes locales sur un quotient de réseau, fournissant ainsi un aperçu essentiel des limites des codes stabilisateurs géométriquement locaux. En guise d’application, nous fournissons des bornes supérieures sur la distance minimale de codes à deux blocs construits à l’aide d’une algèbre d’un groupe abélien, une famille de codes LDPC quantiques pour laquelle la distance minimale est actuellement inconnue. Ces dernières années, des codes LDPC quantiques asymptotiquement bons ont été construits, mais les résultats démontrables concernant leurs distances minimales ne s’appliquent qu’à des codes trop longs pour être utilisables. Dans le cadre des efforts visant à concevoir des codes pouvant être mis en œuvre à court terme, nous construisons des instances courtes de codes quantiques de Tanner à l’aide de complexes carrés obtenus à partir de produits liftés de graphes réguliers. Plusieurs instances explicites de ces codes présentent des distances minimales dépassant la racine carrée de la longueur du code.

•Dec 2, 2025•0 citations

Breaking the Orthogonality Barrier in Quantum LDPC Codes

Kenta Kasai

Classical low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes are a widely deployed and well-established technology, forming the backbone of modern communication and storage systems. It is well known that, in this classical setting, increasing the girth of the Tanner graph while maintaining regular degree distributions leads simultaneously to good belief-propagation (BP) decoding performance and large minimum distance. In the quantum setting, however, this principle does not directly apply because quantum LDPC codes must satisfy additional orthogonality constraints between their parity-check matrices. When one enforces both orthogonality and regularity in a straightforward manner, the girth is typically reduced and the minimum distance becomes structurally upper bounded. In this work, we overcome this limitation by using permutation matrices with controlled commutativity and by restricting the orthogonality constraints to only the active part of the construction, while preserving regular check-matrix structures. This design circumvents conventional structural distance limitations induced by parent-matrix orthogonality, and enables the construction of quantum LDPC codes with large girth while avoiding latent low-weight logical operators. As a concrete demonstration, we construct a girth-8, (3,12)-regular $[[9216,4612, \leq 48]]$ quantum LDPC code and show that, under BP decoding combined with a low-complexity post-processing algorithm, it achieves a frame error rate as low as $10^{-8}$ on the depolarizing channel with error probability $4 \%$.

quant-pharXiv:2601.08824•Quantum•Jan 14, 2026•0 citations

Analysis of the Error-Correcting Radius of a Renormalization Decoder for Kitaev’s Toric Code

Wouter Rozendaal, Gilles Zémor

Kitaev’s toric code is arguably the most studied quantum code and is expected to be implemented in future generations of quantum computers. The renormalisation decoders introduced by Duclos-Cianci and Poulin exhibit one of the best trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency, with a time complexity inO(nlog2n). One question that was left open is how they handle worst-case or adversarial errors, i.e. what is the order of magnitude of the smallest weight of an error pattern that will be wrongly decoded. We initiate such a study involving a simple hard-decision and deterministic version of a renormalisation decoder. We exhibit an uncorrectable error pattern whose weight scales liked1/2and prove that the decoder corrects all error patterns of weight less than 5/6dlog2(6/5), wheredis the minimum distance of the toric code.

IEEE Transactions on Information Theory•May 6, 2024•1 citation
Quantum Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) codes provide a promising solution to protect quantum information from errors and are therefore considered an important step in the realisation of a fullscale fault-tolerant quantum computer. In this thesis, we study quantum LDPC codes under three different approaches, providing insights into renormalisation decoding for Kitaev’s toric code, establishing bounds on the minimum distance of geometrically-local codes, and constructing small instances of quantum Tanner codes. Kitaev’s toric code is a prominent quantum LDPC code that is currently the most widely pursued for experimental implementation. We focus on the probabilistic renormalisation decoders introduced by Duclos- Cianci and Poulin, a family of decoders that exhibit one of the best trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency. We study how they handle adversarial errors by introducing a deterministic renormalisation decoder that does not use a priori probabilities of the error model. We find that this renormalisation decoder allows for fractal-like uncorrectable error patterns, and we obtain a lower bound on the weight of such errors. Due to physical constraints, a lot of attention has gone into quantum LDPC codes whose stabilisers act only on a limited number of nearby qubits. We extend the well-known Bravyi-Terhal bound to quantum codes defined by local constraints on a lattice quotient, providing a crucial insight into the limitations of geometrically-local stabiliser codes. As an application, we provide upper bounds on the minimum distance of Abelian Two-Block Group Algebra codes, a family of quantum LDPC codes for which the minimum distance is currently unknown. In recent years, asymptotically good quantum LDPC codes were constructed, but provable results on their minimum distances only apply to impractically long codes. Following the effort in the design of near-term implementable codes, we construct short instances of quantum Tanner codes using square complexes obtained from lifted products of regular graphs. Several explicit instances of these codes exhibit minimum distances surpassing the square root of the code length.
Kitaev's toric code is arguably the most studied quantum code and is expected to be implemented in future generations of quantum computers. The renormalisation decoders introduced by Duclos-Cianci and Poulin exhibit one of the best trade-offs between efficiency and speed, but one question that was left open is how they handle worst-case or adversarial errors, i.e. what is the order of magnitude of the smallest weight of an error pattern that will be wrongly decoded. We initiate such a study involving a simple hard-decision and deterministic version of a renormalisation decoder. We exhibit an uncorrectable error pattern whose weight scales like d1/2and prove that the decoder corrects all error patterns of weight less than 56dlog⁡2(6/5)\frac{5}{6}{d^{{{\log }_2}(6/5)}}65​dlog2​(6/5), where d is the minimum distance of the toric code.
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.
Kitaev's toric code is arguably the most studied quantum code and is expected to be implemented in future generations of quantum computers. The renormalisation decoders introduced by Duclos-Cianci and Poulin exhibit one of the best trade-offs between efficiency and speed, but one question that was left open is how they handle worst-case or adversarial errors, i.e. what is the order of magnitude of the smallest weight of an error pattern that will be wrongly decoded. We initiate such a study involving a simple hard-decision and deterministic version of a renormalisation decoder. We exhibit an uncorrectable error pattern whose weight scales like d1/2d^{1/2}d1/2 and prove that the decoder corrects all error patterns of weight less than 56dlog⁡2(6/5)\frac{5}{6} d^{\log_{2}(6/5)}65​dlog2​(6/5), where ddd is the minimum distance of the toric code.
Étude de codes LDPC quantiques et de leur décodage Les codes quantiques de type LDPC (Low-Density Parity-Check, à matrice de parité creuse) offrent une solution prometteuse pour protéger l’information quantique contre les erreurs et sont donc considérés comme une étape importante dans la réalisation à grande échelle d’un ordinateur quantique tolérant aux fautes. Dans cette thèse, nous étudions les codes LDPC quantiques selon trois approches différentes, en analysant le décodage par renormalisation du code torique de Kitaev, en établissant des limites sur la distance minimale des codes géométriquement locaux et en construisant de petits exemples de codes de Tanner quantiques. Le code torique de Kitaev est un code LDPC quantique remarquable et est actuellement le plus largement considéré pour une mise en œuvre expérimentale. Nous examinons les décodeurs par renormalisation probabiliste introduits par Duclos-Cianci et Poulin, une famille de décodeurs qui offrent l’un des meilleurs compromis entre précision et rapidité. Nous étudions la manière dont ils gèrent les erreurs adverses en introduisant un décodeur par renormalisation déterministe, n’utilisant pas les probabilités a priori du modèle d’erreur. Nous constatons que ce décodeur par renormalisation admet des motifs d’erreurs incorrigibles de type fractal et nous obtenons une borne inférieure sur le poids de ces erreurs. En raison de contraintes physiques, une grande attention a été accordée aux codes LDPC quantiques dont les stabilisateurs n’agissent que sur un nombre limité de qubits voisins. Nous étendons la fameuse borne de Bravyi-Terhal aux codes quantiques définis par des contraintes locales sur un quotient de réseau, fournissant ainsi un aperçu essentiel des limites des codes stabilisateurs géométriquement locaux. En guise d’application, nous fournissons des bornes supérieures sur la distance minimale de codes à deux blocs construits à l’aide d’une algèbre d’un groupe abélien, une famille de codes LDPC quantiques pour laquelle la distance minimale est actuellement inconnue. Ces dernières années, des codes LDPC quantiques asymptotiquement bons ont été construits, mais les résultats démontrables concernant leurs distances minimales ne s’appliquent qu’à des codes trop longs pour être utilisables. Dans le cadre des efforts visant à concevoir des codes pouvant être mis en œuvre à court terme, nous construisons des instances courtes de codes quantiques de Tanner à l’aide de complexes carrés obtenus à partir de produits liftés de graphes réguliers. Plusieurs instances explicites de ces codes présentent des distances minimales dépassant la racine carrée de la longueur du code.
Classical low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes are a widely deployed and well-established technology, forming the backbone of modern communication and storage systems. It is well known that, in this classical setting, increasing the girth of the Tanner graph while maintaining regular degree distributions leads simultaneously to good belief-propagation (BP) decoding performance and large minimum distance. In the quantum setting, however, this principle does not directly apply because quantum LDPC codes must satisfy additional orthogonality constraints between their parity-check matrices. When one enforces both orthogonality and regularity in a straightforward manner, the girth is typically reduced and the minimum distance becomes structurally upper bounded. In this work, we overcome this limitation by using permutation matrices with controlled commutativity and by restricting the orthogonality constraints to only the active part of the construction, while preserving regular check-matrix structures. This design circumvents conventional structural distance limitations induced by parent-matrix orthogonality, and enables the construction of quantum LDPC codes with large girth while avoiding latent low-weight logical operators. As a concrete demonstration, we construct a girth-8, (3,12)-regular [[9216,4612,≤48]][[9216,4612, \leq 48]][[9216,4612,≤48]] quantum LDPC code and show that, under BP decoding combined with a low-complexity post-processing algorithm, it achieves a frame error rate as low as 10−810^{-8}10−8 on the depolarizing channel with error probability 4%4 \%4%.
Kitaev’s toric code is arguably the most studied quantum code and is expected to be implemented in future generations of quantum computers. The renormalisation decoders introduced by Duclos-Cianci and Poulin exhibit one of the best trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency, with a time complexity inO(nlog2n). One question that was left open is how they handle worst-case or adversarial errors, i.e. what is the order of magnitude of the smallest weight of an error pattern that will be wrongly decoded. We initiate such a study involving a simple hard-decision and deterministic version of a renormalisation decoder. We exhibit an uncorrectable error pattern whose weight scales liked1/2and prove that the decoder corrects all error patterns of weight less than 5/6dlog2(6/5), wheredis the minimum distance of the toric code.