We show that for any
R,ε>0 and any prime
p≥2, there exists an infinite family of
p-ary quantum low-density parity-check (QLDPC) codes, rate
R, checks of weight
Oε(1), and normalized distance at least
δGV(p,R)−ε. Here,
δGV(p,R) denotes the quantum Gilbert-Varshamov (GV) bound for
p-ary stabilizer codes.
In fact, we construct an ensemble of such QLDPC codes, such that a random code from this ensemble is close to the GV bound with high probability. Moreover, this ensemble matches the performance of random stabilizer codes on several quantum channels. Specifically, it approaches the quantum capacity of the erasure channel and the hashing bound for memoryless Pauli channels, including the depolarizing channel.
A significant challenge in working with QLDPC codes is that they are necessarily \emph{degenerate}, i.e., contain many low-weight stabilizers. A key contribution of our work is a construction of QLDPC codes with quantitative control on their degeneracy. These codes are obtained by combining known constructions of asymptotically good QLDPC codes with the expander-based distance amplification procedure of Alon, Edmonds, and Luby [FOCS'95].
Our random ensemble is constructed by starting with these low-degeneracy QLDPC codes near the quantum Singleton bound and concatenating each coordinate with a random inner code. This can be viewed as a quantum analogue of Thommesen's construction, and as an LDPC version of a result of Ouyang, with an appropriately designed outer code.
Classical row-circulant quasi-cyclic (QC) low-density parity check (LDPC) matrices are known to generate efficient high-rate short and moderate-length QC-LDPC codes, while the comparable random structures exhibit numerous short cycles of length-4. Therefore, we conceive a general formalism for constructing nondual-containing Calderbank-Shor-Steane (CSS)-type quantum low-density parity check (QLDPC) codes from arbitrary classical row-circulant QC-LDPC matrices. We apply our proposed formalism to the classical balanced incomplete block design (BIBD)-based row-circulant QC-LDPC codes for demonstrating that our designed codes outperform their dual-containing CSS-type counterparts as well as the entanglement-assisted (EA)-QLDPC codes.
Due to their fast decoding algorithms, quantum generalizations of low-density parity check, or LDPC, codes have been investigated as a solution to the problem of decoherence in fragile quantum states. However, the additional twisted inner product requirements of quantum stabilizer codes force four-cycles and eliminate the possibility of randomly generated quantum LDPC codes. Moreover, the classes of quantum LDPC codes discovered thus far generally have unknown or small minimum distance, or a fixed rate. This paper presents several new classes of quantum LDPC codes constructed from finite projective planes. These codes have rates that increase with the block length
n and minimum weights proportional to
n1/2.