Adaptively correcting quantum errors with entanglement

Contrary to the assumption that most quantum error-correcting codes (QECC) make, it is expected that phase errors are much more likely than bit errors in physical devices. By employing the entanglement-assisted stabilizer formalism, we develop a new kind of error-correcting protocol which can flexibly trade error correction abilities between the two types of errors, such that high error correction performance is achieved both in symmetric and in asymmetric situations. The characteristics of the QECCs can be optimized in an adaptive manner during information transmission. The proposed entanglement-assisted QECCs require only one ebit regardless of the degree of asymmetry at a given moment and can be decoded in polynomial time.Comment: 5 pages, final submission to ISIT 2011, Saint-Petersburg, Russi

Entanglement-Assisted Quantum Quasi-Cyclic Low-Density Parity-Check Codes

We investigate the construction of quantum low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes from classical quasi-cyclic (QC) LDPC codes with girth greater than or equal to 6. We have shown that the classical codes in the generalized Calderbank-Shor-Steane (CSS) construction do not need to satisfy the dual-containing property as long as pre-shared entanglement is available to both sender and receiver. We can use this to avoid the many 4-cycles which typically arise in dual-containing LDPC codes. The advantage of such quantum codes comes from the use of efficient decoding algorithms such as sum-product algorithm (SPA). It is well known that in the SPA, cycles of length 4 make successive decoding iterations highly correlated and hence limit the decoding performance. We show the principle of constructing quantum QC-LDPC codes which require only small amounts of initial shared entanglement.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure. Final version that will show up on PRA. Minor changes in contents and Titl

High performance entanglement-assisted quantum LDPC codes need little entanglement

Though the entanglement-assisted formalism provides a universal connection between a classical linear code and an entanglement-assisted quantum error-correcting code (EAQECC), the issue of maintaining large amount of pure maximally entangled states in constructing EAQECCs is a practical obstacle to its use. It is also conjectured that the power of entanglement-assisted formalism to convert those good classical codes comes from massive consumption of maximally entangled states. We show that the above conjecture is wrong by providing families of EAQECCs with an entanglement consumption rate that diminishes linearly as a function of the code length. Notably, two families of EAQECCs constructed in the paper require only one copy of maximally entangled state no matter how large the code length is. These families of EAQECCs that are constructed from classical finite geometric LDPC codes perform very well according to our numerical simulations. Our work indicates that EAQECCs are not only theoretically interesting, but also physically implementable. Finally, these high performance entanglement-assisted LDPC codes with low entanglement consumption rates allow one to construct high-performance standard QECCs with very similar parameters.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures. Published versio

Fifteen years of quantum LDPC coding and improved decoding strategies

The near-capacity performance of classical low-density parity check (LDPC) codes and their efficient iterative decoding makes quantum LDPC (QLPDC) codes a promising candidate for quantum error correction. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of QLDPC codes from the perspective of code design as well as in terms of their decoding algorithms. We also conceive a modified non-binary decoding algorithm for homogeneous Calderbank-Shor-Steane-type QLDPC codes, which is capable of alleviating the problems imposed by the unavoidable length-four cycles. Our modified decoder outperforms the state-of-the-art decoders in terms of their word error rate performance, despite imposing a reduced decoding complexity. Finally, we intricately amalgamate our modified decoder with the classic uniformly reweighted belief propagation for the sake of achieving an improved performance

Applications of finite geometries to designs and codes

This dissertation concerns the intersection of three areas of discrete mathematics: finite geometries, design theory, and coding theory. The central theme is the power of finite geometry designs, which are constructed from the points and t-dimensional subspaces of a projective or affine geometry. We use these designs to construct and analyze combinatorial objects which inherit their best properties from these geometric structures. A central question in the study of finite geometry designs is Hamada’s conjecture, which proposes that finite geometry designs are the unique designs with minimum p-rank among all designs with the same parameters. In this dissertation, we will examine several questions related to Hamada’s conjecture, including the existence of counterexamples. We will also study the applicability of certain decoding methods to known counterexamples. We begin by constructing an infinite family of counterexamples to Hamada’s conjecture. These designs are the first infinite class of counterexamples for the affine case of Hamada’s conjecture. We further demonstrate how these designs, along with the projective polarity designs of Jungnickel and Tonchev, admit majority-logic decoding schemes. The codes obtained from these polarity designs attain error-correcting performance which is, in certain cases, equal to that of the finite geometry designs from which they are derived. This further demonstrates the highly geometric structure maintained by these designs. Finite geometries also help us construct several types of quantum error-correcting codes. We use relatives of finite geometry designs to construct infinite families of q-ary quantum stabilizer codes. We also construct entanglement-assisted quantum error-correcting codes (EAQECCs) which admit a particularly efficient and effective error-correcting scheme, while also providing the first general method for constructing these quantum codes with known parameters and desirable properties. Finite geometry designs are used to give exceptional examples of these codes

Characterization and mass formulas of symplectic self-orthogonal and LCD codes and their application

The object of this paper is to study two very important classes of codes in coding theory, namely self-orthogonal (SO) and linear complementary dual (LCD) codes under the symplectic inner product, involving characterization, constructions, and their application. Using such a characterization, we determine the mass formulas of symplectic SO and LCD codes by considering the action of the symplectic group, and further obtain some asymptotic results. Finally, under the Hamming distance, we obtain some symplectic SO (resp. LCD) codes with improved parameters directly compared with Euclidean SO (resp. LCD) codes. Under the symplectic distance, we obtain some additive SO (resp. additive complementary dual) codes with improved parameters directly compared with Hermitian SO (resp. LCD) codes. Further, we also construct many good additive codes outperform the best-known linear codes in Grassl's code table. As an application, we construct a number of record-breaking (entanglement-assisted) quantum error-correcting codes, which improve Grassl's code table

Expanders with Symmetry: Constructions and Applications

Expanders are sparse yet well-connected graphs with numerous theoretical and practical uses. Symmetry is a valuable structure for expanders as it enables efficient algorithms and a richer set of applications. This thesis studies expanders with symmetry, giving new constructions and applications. We extend expander construction techniques to work with symmetry and give explicit constructions of expanders with varying quality of expansion and symmetries of various groups. In particular, we construct graphs with large Abelian group symmetries via the technique of \textit{graph lifts}. We also give a generic amplification procedure that converts a weak expander to an almost optimal one while preserving symmetries. This procedure is obtained by generalizing prior amplification techniques that work for Cayley graphs over Abelian groups to Cayley graphs over any finite group. In particular, we obtain almost-Ramanujan expanders over every non-abelian finite simple group. We then explore the utility of having both symmetry and expansion simultaneously. We obtain explicit quantum LDPC codes of almost linear distance and \textit{good} classical quasi-cyclic codes with varying circulant sizes using prior results and our constructions of graphs with Abelian symmetries. We show how our generic amplification machinery boosts various structured expander-like objects: \textit{quantum expanders}, \textit{dimension expanders}, and \textit{monotone expanders}. Finally, we prove a structural result about expanding Cayley graphs, showing that they satisfy a \enquote{degree-2} variant of the \textit{expander mixing lemma}. As an application of this, we give a randomness-efficient query algorithm for \textit{homomorphism testing} of unitary-valued functions on finite groups and a derandomized version of the celebrated Babai--Nikolov--Pyber (BNP) lemma