Quantum LDPC Codes Beyond the Orthogonality Barrier: High Girth, Short Block Lengths, and Certified Distance

Liangdong Lu, Guanmin Guo, Yang Liu +1 more

Bicycle (two-block circulant) quantum low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes include some of the best known small quantum codes, yet their design has relied on group-algebra formulations in which the dimension and distance are accessible only through matrix computation. We show that in the cyclic case the construction collapses into the polynomial ring $\F_2[x]/(x^{l}-1)$: self-orthogonality is automatic, the quantum dimension is read off from a polynomial gcd, and the minimum distance is certified exactly through the Calderbank correspondence to additive codes over $\F_4$, turning code search into an algebraically pre-filtered enumeration that reaches parameter regimes poorly covered by existing tables. A computer search based on this framework recovers the short codes $[[42,12,4]]_2$ and $[[62,12,4]]_2$ and produces a family of codes with competitive figure of merit $kd^2/n$, including $[[66,20,7]]_2$ with $kd^2/n=14.85$, above the bivariate bicycle code $[[144,12,12]]_2$ ($kd^2/n=12$) at less than half the block length, together with $[[46,2,8]]_2$, $[[66,2,9]]_2$, $[[66,4,8]]_2$, $[[66,6,8]]_2$ and, at $n=90$, $[[90,16,6]]_2$, $[[90,18,6]]_2$, $[[90,20,6]]_2$. An exhaustive census at $n=48$ delineates the boundary of this picture: we exhibit a $[[48,10,6]]_2$ code from a minimal $48$-element group (the Aydin--Tamo--Barg realization uses $72$ elements), and prove that distance $5$ forces a stabilizer-rank loss, which excludes $[[48,10,5]]_2$ from the weight-$8$ symmetric coset family. The framework thus opens a systematic route to bicycle-type quantum LDPC codes beyond the reach of group-theoretic searches, and identifies exactly where genuinely coset-theoretic phenomena begin.

Kenta Kasai, Kenta Kasai

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 $4 \%$.

Kenta Kasai

Kenta Kasai, Kenta Kasai

Koki Okada, Kenta Kasai

We study square-base Calderbank--Shor--Steane (CSS) hypergraph-product codes as a finite-length class for regular high-girth quantum low-density parity-check (LDPC) design. For base matrices of small column weight, we give checkable conditions for regularity, rank deficiency, and short-cycle exclusion, and we present explicit column-weight-three and column-weight-four examples with Tanner girth 6 and 8. We also analyze circulant permutation matrix (CPM) lifts of this class. Using the standard voltage-sum criterion, we identify orthogonality-forced Tanner 8-cycles and show that CPM lifting cannot raise the Tanner girth beyond 8 when these cycles are present. As a representative finite-length instance, a randomized CPM lift of the girth-8 base construction gives a $[[28800,62,18\le d\le192]]$ girth-8 $(3,6)$-regular CSS-LDPC code. Complete enumeration excludes nontrivial logical supports of weight at most $16$ on both sides, giving $d_X,d_Z\ge18$; explicit weight-$192$ representatives give $d_X,d_Z\le192$. Under degeneracy-aware belief-propagation decoding with optional ordered-statistics-decoding-lite post-processing, this code produced zero decoding failures in $2.993\times 10^8$ independent trials at depolarizing probability $p=0.1402$; the Wilson 95\% upper confidence bound is $1.28\times 10^{-8}$.