Quantum Locally Repairable Codes from Negacyclic and Repeated-Root Cyclic Codes over Small Fields

Abstract

Quantum locally recoverable codes (qLRCs), introduced recently by Golowich and Guruswami, allow any single-qudit erasure to be recovered from a small set of other qudits. Most known constructions require a large alphabet. We systematically investigate qLRCs obtained, via the CSS construction, from classical constacyclic codes over small fields $\Ff_q$ with $q\in\{2,3,4,5,7\}$. First, we prove that a nonzero dual-containing $\lambda$-constacyclic code exists only when $\lambda^2=1$, so that negacyclic and (repeated-root) cyclic codes exhaust the constacyclic route to qLRCs. Second, we show that the locality of a constacyclic code equals the minimum distance of its dual minus one, and we give a simple purity criterion for the resulting quantum codes. Third, we show that odd-like duadic codes whose splitting is given by $\mu_{-1}$ yield pure qLRCs; specializing to $q$-ary quadratic residue codes of prime length $p\equiv 3 \pmod 4$ gives an infinite family of pure qLRCs with unbounded minimum distance and certified locality. Finally, by means of concrete computations, we obtain a classification of qLRCs from cyclic, negacyclic, and repeated-root cyclic codes of moderate lengths, which contains the first binary qLRCs from repeated-root cyclic codes and many parameter sets that cyclic codes cannot attain.