The quantum Hamming bound arises from a direct dimension estimate for exact quantum error-correcting codes. For nondegenerate codes, distinct correctable errors map the code space into orthogonal subspaces, so dimension counting directly gives the bound; degeneracy allows these subspaces to overlap and invalidates the argument. Although linear-programming, asymptotic, and structural approaches have advanced the problem from several directions, the general local-dimension case has remained open. Here we prove the quantum Hamming bound for every local dimension
q≥3. Building on the exact two-center Fourier reduction, we develop new overlap estimates for nonbinary Hamming spaces. For
q≥4, Jacobi estimates and monotonicity give a uniform gap; qutrits form the boundary case where the gap vanishes and are handled by a filtered correction. This completes the finite-length nonbinary case; together with the existing qubit result, it establishes the quantum Hamming bound for arbitrary local dimension.
We give an infinite family of degenerate entanglement-assisted quantum error-correcting codes (EAQECCs) which violate the EA-quantum Hamming bound for non-degenerate EAQECCs and achieve the EA-quantum Singleton bound, thereby proving that the EA-quantum Hamming bound does not asymptotically hold for degenerate EAQECCs. Unlike the previously known quantum error-correcting codes that violate the quantum Hamming bound by exploiting maximally entangled pairs of qubits, our codes do not require local unitary operations on the entangled auxiliary qubits during encoding. The degenerate EAQECCs we present are constructed from classical error-correcting codes with poor minimum distances, which implies that, unlike the majority of known EAQECCs with large minimum distances, our EAQECCs take more advantage of degeneracy and rely less on the error correction capabilities of classical codes.