Explicit Abelian Lifts and Quantum LDPC Codes

For an abelian group H acting on the set [?], an (H,?)-lift of a graph G? is a graph obtained by replacing each vertex by ? copies, and each edge by a matching corresponding to the action of an element of H. Expanding graphs obtained via abelian lifts, form a key ingredient in the recent breakthrough constructions of quantum LDPC codes, (implicitly) in the fiber bundle codes by Hastings, Haah and O\u27Donnell [STOC 2021] achieving distance ??(N^{3/5}), and in those by Panteleev and Kalachev [IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 2021] of distance ?(N/log(N)). However, both these constructions are non-explicit. In particular, the latter relies on a randomized construction of expander graphs via abelian lifts by Agarwal et al. [SIAM J. Discrete Math 2019]. In this work, we show the following explicit constructions of expanders obtained via abelian lifts. For every (transitive) abelian group H ? Sym(?), constant degree d ? 3 and ? > 0, we construct explicit d-regular expander graphs G obtained from an (H,?)-lift of a (suitable) base n-vertex expander G? with the following parameters: ii) ?(G) ? 2?{d-1} + ?, for any lift size ? ? 2^{n^{?}} where ? = ?(d,?), iii) ?(G) ? ? ? d, for any lift size ? ? 2^{n^{??}} for a fixed ?? > 0, when d ? d?(?), or iv) ?(G) ? O?(?d), for lift size "exactly" ? = 2^{?(n)}. As corollaries, we obtain explicit quantum lifted product codes of Panteleev and Kalachev of almost linear distance (and also in a wide range of parameters) and explicit classical quasi-cyclic LDPC codes with wide range of circulant sizes. Items (i) and (ii) above are obtained by extending the techniques of Mohanty, O\u27Donnell and Paredes [STOC 2020] for 2-lifts to much larger abelian lift sizes (as a byproduct simplifying their construction). This is done by providing a new encoding of special walks arising in the trace power method, carefully "compressing" depth-first search traversals. Result (iii) is via a simpler proof of Agarwal et al. [SIAM J. Discrete Math 2019] at the expense of polylog factors in the expansion