Rank weight hierarchy of some classes of cyclic codes

We study the rank weight hierarchy, thus in particular the rank metric, of cyclic codes over the finite field $\mathbb F_{q^m}$, $q$ a prime power, $m \geq 2$. We establish the rank weight hierarchy for $[n,n-1]$ cyclic codes and characterize $[n,k]$ cyclic codes of rank metric 1 when (1) $k=1$, (2) $n$ and $q$ are coprime, and (3) the characteristic $char(\mathbb F_q)$ divides $n$. Finally, for $n$ and $q$ coprime, cyclic codes of minimal $r$-rank are characterized, and a refinement of the Singleton bound for the rank weight is derived

The disjointness of stabilizer codes and limitations on fault-tolerant logical gates

Stabilizer codes are a simple and successful class of quantum error-correcting codes. Yet this success comes in spite of some harsh limitations on the ability of these codes to fault-tolerantly compute. Here we introduce a new metric for these codes, the disjointness, which, roughly speaking, is the number of mostly non-overlapping representatives of any given non-trivial logical Pauli operator. We use the disjointness to prove that transversal gates on error-detecting stabilizer codes are necessarily in a finite level of the Clifford hierarchy. We also apply our techniques to topological code families to find similar bounds on the level of the hierarchy attainable by constant depth circuits, regardless of their geometric locality. For instance, we can show that symmetric 2D surface codes cannot have non-local constant depth circuits for non-Clifford gates.Comment: 8+3 pages, 2 figures. Comments welcom

Fault-tolerant logical gates in quantum error-correcting codes

Recently, Bravyi and K\"onig have shown that there is a tradeoff between fault-tolerantly implementable logical gates and geometric locality of stabilizer codes. They consider locality-preserving operations which are implemented by a constant depth geometrically local circuit and are thus fault-tolerant by construction. In particular, they shown that, for local stabilizer codes in D spatial dimensions, locality preserving gates are restricted to a set of unitary gates known as the D-th level of the Clifford hierarchy. In this paper, we elaborate this idea and provide several extensions and applications of their characterization in various directions. First, we present a new no-go theorem for self-correcting quantum memory. Namely, we prove that a three-dimensional stabilizer Hamiltonian with a locality-preserving implementation of a non-Clifford gate cannot have a macroscopic energy barrier. Second, we prove that the code distance of a D-dimensional local stabilizer code with non-trivial locality-preserving m-th level Clifford logical gate is upper bounded by $O(L^{D+1-m})$. For codes with non-Clifford gates (m>2), this improves the previous best bound by Bravyi and Terhal. Third we prove that a qubit loss threshold of codes with non-trivial transversal m-th level Clifford logical gate is upper bounded by 1/m. As such, no family of fault-tolerant codes with transversal gates in increasing level of the Clifford hierarchy may exist. This result applies to arbitrary stabilizer and subsystem codes, and is not restricted to geometrically-local codes. Fourth we extend the result of Bravyi and K\"onig to subsystem codes. A technical difficulty is that, unlike stabilizer codes, the so-called union lemma does not apply to subsystem codes. This problem is avoided by assuming the presence of error threshold in a subsystem code, and the same conclusion as Bravyi-K\"onig is recovered.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figure

THE WEIGHT HIERARCHY OF HADAMARD CODES

The support of an $(n, M, d)$ binary code  $C$ over the set $\mathbf{A}=\{0,1\}$ is the set of all coordinate positions $i$, such  that  at  least two codewords  have distinct entry  in  coordinate $i$.  The  $r$th  generalized  Hamming  weight  $d_r(C)$,  $1\leq r\leq 1+log_2n+1$,  of  $C$  is  defined  as  the minimum  of  the  cardinalities  of  the  supports  of  all subset  of  $C$ of cardinality $2^{r-1}+1$.  The  sequence $(d_1(C), d_2(C), \ldots, d_k(C))$ is called the Hamming weight hierarchy (HWH) of $C$. In this paper we obtain HWH for $(2^k-1, 2^k, 2^{k-1}$ binary Hadamard code corresponding to Sylvester Hadamard matrix $H_{2^k}$ and we show that    $$d_r=2^{k-r} (2^r -1).$$ Also we compute the HWH of all $(4n-1, 4n, 2n)$ Hadamard code for $2\leq n\leq 8$

Permutation Decoding and the Stopping Redundancy Hierarchy of Cyclic and Extended Cyclic Codes

We introduce the notion of the stopping redundancy hierarchy of a linear block code as a measure of the trade-off between performance and complexity of iterative decoding for the binary erasure channel. We derive lower and upper bounds for the stopping redundancy hierarchy via Lovasz's Local Lemma and Bonferroni-type inequalities, and specialize them for codes with cyclic parity-check matrices. Based on the observed properties of parity-check matrices with good stopping redundancy characteristics, we develop a novel decoding technique, termed automorphism group decoding, that combines iterative message passing and permutation decoding. We also present bounds on the smallest number of permutations of an automorphism group decoder needed to correct any set of erasures up to a prescribed size. Simulation results demonstrate that for a large number of algebraic codes, the performance of the new decoding method is close to that of maximum likelihood decoding.Comment: 40 pages, 6 figures, 10 tables, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theor