52 research outputs found
On Subsystem Codes Beating the Hamming or Singleton Bound
Subsystem codes are a generalization of noiseless subsystems, decoherence
free subspaces, and quantum error-correcting codes. We prove a Singleton bound
for GF(q)-linear subsystem codes. It follows that no subsystem code over a
prime field can beat the Singleton bound. On the other hand, we show the
remarkable fact that there exist impure subsystem codes beating the Hamming
bound. A number of open problems concern the comparison in performance of
stabilizer and subsystem codes. One of the open problems suggested by Poulin's
work asks whether a subsystem code can use fewer syndrome measurements than an
optimal MDS stabilizer code while encoding the same number of qudits and having
the same distance. We prove that linear subsystem codes cannot offer such an
improvement under complete decoding.Comment: 18 pages more densely packed than classically possibl
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