Linear-Time Encodable and Decodable Quantum Error-Correcting Codes

TL;DR

This paper introduces quantum error-correcting codes that can be efficiently encoded and decoded using circuits with logarithmic depth and linear size, advancing fault-tolerant quantum communication.

Contribution

It presents the first constructions of quantum codes with logarithmic-depth encoding and decoding, suitable for fault-tolerant quantum communication.

Findings

Codes with logarithmic-depth encoding and decoding

Explicit codes with linear size and logarithmic depth

Asymptotically good quantum codes with efficient circuits

Abstract

Recent years have seen rapid development in the subject of quantum coding theory, with breakthroughs on many exciting classes of codes, including quantum LDPC codes, quantum locally testable codes, and quantum codes with interesting transversal gates. However, a natural class of quantum codes, which has been well-studied classically, has not yet been treated: those which can be quickly encoded and decoded. This problem concerns the channel capacity setting, where a noise channel sits between perfect encoding and unencoding/decoding operations; this is the setting that is relevant for communication between fault-tolerant quantum computers. In this work, we construct asymptotically good quantum codes that can be encoded and unencoded by quantum circuits of logarithmic depth and consisting of a linear total number of gates. The classical decoding algorithms also run in logarithmic depth and use $\mathcal{O}(n \log n)$ gates, or alternatively a linear number of gates but with higher depth. We further construct explicit and asymptotically good quantum codes whose encoding, unencoding and decoding all use a linear number of gates, and additionally whose encoding and unencoding may be run in logarithmic depth.