Statistical mechanics of error exponents for error-correcting codes

Error exponents characterize the exponential decay, when increasing message length, of the probability of error of many error-correcting codes. To tackle the long standing problem of computing them exactly, we introduce a general, thermodynamic, formalism that we illustrate with maximum-likelihood decoding of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes on the binary erasure channel (BEC) and the binary symmetric channel (BSC). In this formalism, we apply the cavity method for large deviations to derive expressions for both the average and typical error exponents, which differ by the procedure used to select the codes from specified ensembles. When decreasing the noise intensity, we find that two phase transitions take place, at two different levels: a glass to ferromagnetic transition in the space of codewords, and a paramagnetic to glass transition in the space of codes.Comment: 32 pages, 13 figure

Distance Verification for Classical and Quantum LDPC Codes

The techniques of distance verification known for general linear codes are first applied to the quantum stabilizer codes. Then, these techniques are considered for classical and quantum (stabilizer) low-density-parity-check (LDPC) codes. New complexity bounds for distance verification with provable performance are derived using the average weight spectra of the ensembles of LDPC codes. These bounds are expressed in terms of the erasure-correcting capacity of the corresponding ensemble. We also present a new irreducible-cluster technique that can be applied to any LDPC code and takes advantage of parity-checks’ sparsity for both the classical and quantum LDPC codes. This technique reduces complexity exponents of all existing deterministic techniques designed for generic stabilizer codes with small relative distances, which also include all known families of the quantum stabilizer LDPC codes