Wire Codes

TL;DR

This paper presents a general method to convert any quantum stabilizer code into a local subsystem code with minimal overhead, suitable for hardware with limited connectivity, by leveraging graph embeddings.

Contribution

It introduces a universal recipe for transforming stabilizer codes into local subsystem codes on arbitrary graphs with low overhead and optimal parameters.

Findings

Wire codes enable local implementation of quantum codes on various graphs.

The method achieves linear overhead in check degree and weight for weight reduction.

Codes on hypercubic lattices and expanding graphs attain optimal scaling in fixed dimensions.

Abstract

Quantum information is fragile and must be protected by a quantum error-correcting code for large-scale practical applications. Recently, highly efficient quantum codes have been discovered which require a high degree of spatial connectivity. This raises the question of how to realize these codes with minimal overhead under physical hardware connectivity constraints. Here, we introduce a general recipe to transform any quantum stabilizer code into a subsystem code that has local interactions, with weight and degree three, on a given graph. We call the subsystem codes produced by our recipe wire codes, and their code parameters depend on the input code and the given graph. Wire codes can be adapted to have a local implementation on any graph that supports a low-density embedding of the input Tanner graph, with an overhead that depends on the embedding. In particular, applying our results to a stabilizer code and a subdivision of its own Tanner graph, yields a quantum weight reduction procedure with a multiplicative qubit overhead and distance reduction that are linear in the input check degree and weight, respectively. Applying our results to hypercubic lattices leads to a construction of local subsystem codes with optimal scaling code parameters in any fixed spatial dimension. Similarly, applying our results to families of expanding graphs leads to local codes on these graphs with code parameters that depend on the degree of expansion. Our results constitute a general method to construct low-overhead subsystem codes on general graphs, which can be applied to adapt highly efficient quantum error correction procedures to hardware with restricted connectivity.