arXiv subjects

Joschka Roffe

Publications and source records attributed to Joschka Roffe.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Efficiently simulable quantum circuits with large entanglement, magic, and non-Gaussianity via code-compiled tensor networks

We introduce a family of quantum circuits that possess standard indicators of classical simulation hardness including high entanglement entropy, magic, and non-Gaussianity, yet admit efficient classical simulation via matrix product states (MPS). Our construction uses logical circuits of high-rate Calderbank-Shor-Steane (CSS) codes with enhanced symmetries. Using code automorphisms and transversal diagonal gates from higher levels of the Clifford hierarchy, we realize nonlocal logical Clifford and non-Clifford gates, showing how error-correcting codes can compile complex logical circuits into simple physical operations. Simulation efficiency rests on two properties: (i) diagonal transversal gates do not increase bond dimension, and (ii) permutations are tracked classically via on-the-fly relabeling, avoiding costly SWAP networks. Unlike Clifford or matchgate simulation, our method accepts a broad class of initial states, including dense entangled, magic, and non-Gaussian inputs, provided the encoded state retains an efficient MPS representation. We also release an exact phase-polynomial backend for monomial subfamilies, whose cost is set by higher-degree phase terms rather than entanglement growth. We demonstrate the method on an infinite polar CSS code family, showing bond dimension stays bounded by the encoding cost regardless of circuit depth. These results show that for some circuit families, standard resource measures are individually insufficient to indicate simulation hardness. As a near-term application, we use the compiled MPS as a classical reference for direct fidelity estimation of a quantum device running nontrivial logical circuits. Pauli sampling on the encoded reference, with a Clifford pushback through the known encoder, provides the ideal expectation values, so the logical output fidelity can be estimated from local Pauli readout alone, without costly state tomography.

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arXiv2026

Nearest-neighbour gates are all you need: High-rate quantum low-density parity-check codes on a planar grid

High-performance quantum low-density parity-check codes promise substantial reductions in the overhead of fault-tolerant quantum computation, but most constructions require long-range connectivity or qubit shuttling, both of which are difficult to realise in superconducting architectures. Here we introduce a family of quantum low-density parity-check codes that, for the first time, combines planar open-boundary layouts, finite-size advantages over surface codes, and syndrome extraction using only nearest-neighbour gates on a square grid of qubits. The key idea is to generate check-data connectivity dynamically: nearest-neighbour iSWAP walks both define the stabiliser supports and implement their measurement, avoiding the need for a long-range hardware graph. The resulting circuits achieve optimal constant-depth stabiliser measurement, independent of code size, and naturally remove leakage from the system by exchanging the role of check and data qubits at each syndrome extraction round. We find finite-size instances such as a [[323,14,15]] code, whose code-efficiency ratio is nearly an order of magnitude larger than that of rotated surface-code patches. At around 30 circuit qubits per logical qubit, the best directional tile-code layouts reduce the per-logical per-round logical error rate by up to a factor of 1000 relative to rotated surface-code memories. These results show that the advantages of quantum low-density parity-check codes can survive compilation into strictly planar nearest-neighbour circuits, bringing low-overhead fault-tolerant memories closer to near-term hardware.

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arXiv2026

QGPU: Parallel logic in quantum LDPC codes

Quantum error correction is critical to the design and manufacture of scalable quantum computing systems. Recently, there has been growing interest in quantum low-density parity-check codes as a resource-efficient alternative to surface codes. Their adoption is hindered by the difficulty of compiling fault-tolerant logical operations. A key challenge is that logical qubits do not necessarily map to disjoint sets of physical qubits, which limits parallelism. We introduce clustered-cyclic codes, a quantum low-density parity-check code family with finite-size instances such as [[136,8,14]] and [[198,18,10]] that are competitive with state-of-the-art constructions. These codes admit a directly addressable logical basis, enabling highly parallel logical measurement layers. To leverage this structure, we propose parallel product surgery for quantum product codes. Using an auxiliary copy of the data patch and an engineered product-connection structure, the protocol performs many logical Pauli-product measurements in a single surgery round with small, fixed overhead. For clustered-cyclic codes, this yields surface-code-style maximal parallelism: up to k/2 disjoint Pauli-product measurements per round under explicit algebraic conditions. We prove that parallel product surgery preserves the code distance for hypergraph product codes and numerically verify distance preservation for the listed clustered-cyclic instances with k = 8. Finally, for the [[24,8,3]] clustered-cyclic code, treating half of the logical qubits as auxiliaries enables arbitrary parallel CNOTs on disjoint pairs; combined with symmetry-derived operations, these gates generate the full Clifford group fault-tolerantly.

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arXiv2025

Colour Codes Reach Surface Code Performance using Vibe Decoding

Two-dimensional quantum colour codes hold significant promise for quantum error correction, offering advantages such as planar connectivity and low overhead logical gates. Despite their theoretical appeal, the practical deployment of these codes faces challenges due to complex decoding requirements compared to surface codes. This paper introduces vibe decoding which, for the first time, brings colour code performance on par with the surface code under practical decoding. Our approach leverages an ensemble of belief propagation decoders - each executing a distinct serial message passing schedule - combined with localised statistics post-processing. We refer to this combined protocol as VibeLSD. The VibeLSD decoder is highly versatile: our numerical results show it outperforms all practical existing colour code decoders across various syndrome extraction schemes, noise models, and error rates. By estimating qubit footprints through quantum memory simulations, we show that colour codes can operate with overhead that is comparable to, and in some cases lower than, that of the surface code. This, combined with the fact that localised statistics decoding is a parallel algorithm, makes VibeLSD suitable for implementation on specialised hardware for real-time decoding. Our results establish the colour code as a practical architecture for near-term quantum hardware, providing improved compilation efficiency for both Clifford and non-Clifford gates without incurring additional qubit overhead relative to the surface code.

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arXiv2025

Logical accreditation: a framework for efficient certification of fault-tolerant computations

As fault-tolerant quantum computers scale, certifying the accuracy of computations performed with encoded logical qubits will soon become classically intractable. This creates a critical need for scalable, device-independent certification methods. In this work, we introduce logical accreditation, a framework for efficiently certifying the correctness of quantum computations performed on logical qubits. Our protocol is robust against general noise models, far beyond those typically considered in performance analyses of quantum error-correcting codes. Through numerical simulations, we demonstrate that logical accreditation can scalably certify quantum advantage experiments and indicate the crossover point where encoded computations begin to outperform physical computations. The framework also enables evaluation of whether logical error rates are sufficiently low that error mitigation can be efficiently performed, extends entropy benchmarking to the regime of fault-tolerant computation, and upper bounds the infidelity of the logical output state of a computation. Underlying the framework is a novel randomised compilation scheme that converts arbitrary logical circuit noise into stochastic Pauli noise. This scheme includes a method for twirling non-transversal logical gates beyond the standard $T$ gate, resolving an open problem posed by [Piveteau et al. PRL 127, 200505 (2021)]. By bridging fault-tolerant computation and computational certification, logical accreditation offers a scalable, practical means of certifying the accuracy of quantum computations performed using encoded logical qubits.

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arXiv2025

Hardware-tailored logical Clifford circuits for stabilizer codes

Quantum error correction is the art of protecting fragile quantum information through suitable encoding and active interventions. After encoding $k$ logical qubits into $n>k$ physical qubits using a stabilizer code, this amounts to measuring stabilizers, decoding syndromes, and applying an appropriate correction. Although quantum information can be protected in this way, it is notoriously difficult to manipulate encoded quantum data without introducing uncorrectable errors. Here, we introduce a mathematical framework for constructing hardware-tailored quantum circuits that implement any desired Clifford unitary on the logical level of any given stabilizer code. Our main contribution is the formulation of this task as a discrete optimization problem. We can explicitly integrate arbitrary hardware connectivity constraints. As a key feature, our framework naturally incorporates an optimization over all Clifford gauges (differing only in their action outside the code space) of a desired logical circuit. In this way, we find, for example, fault-tolerant and teleportation-free logical Hadamard circuits for the $[[8,3,2]]$ code. From a broader perspective, we turn away from the standard generator decomposition approach and instead focus on the holistic compilation of entire logical circuits, leading to significant savings in practice. Our work introduces both the necessary mathematics and open-source software to compile hardware-tailored logical Clifford circuits for stabilizer codes.

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arXiv2025

Engineering CSS surgery: compiling any CNOT in any code

We introduce a framework for implementing logic in CSS quantum error correction codes, building on the surgery methods of Cowtan and Burton [CB24]. Our approach offers a systematic methodology for designing and analysing surgery protocols. At the physical level, we introduce the concept of subcodes, which encapsulate all the necessary data for performing surgery. At the logical level, leveraging homological algebra, subcodes enable us to track the logical operations induced by any surgery protocol, regardless of the choice of logical operator basis. In particular, we make no assumptions on the structure of the logical operators of the code. As a proof of concept, we develop a surgery protocol inspired by lattice surgery that implements a logical CNOT gate between any two logical qubits of any CSS code, with fault-tolerance guarantees.

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arXiv2025

Computing Efficiently in QLDPC Codes

It is the prevailing belief that quantum error correcting techniques will be required to build a utility-scale quantum computer able to perform computations that are out of reach of classical computers. The QECCs that have been most extensively studied and therefore highly optimized, surface codes, are extremely resource intensive in terms of the number of physical qubits needed. A promising alternative, QLDPC codes, has been proposed more recently. These codes are much less resource intensive, requiring significantly fewer physical qubits per logical qubit than practical surface code implementations. A successful application of QLDPC codes would therefore drastically reduce the timeline to reaching quantum computers that can run algorithms with proven exponential speedups like Shor's algorithm and QPE. However to date QLDPC codes have been predominantly studied in the context of quantum memories; there has been no known method for implementing arbitrary logical Clifford operators in a QLDPC code proven efficient in terms of circuit depth. In combination with known methods for implementing T gates, an efficient implementation of the Clifford group unlocks resource-efficient universal quantum computation. In this paper, we introduce a new family of QLDPC codes that enable efficient compilation of the full Clifford group via transversal operations. Our construction executes any m-qubit Clifford operation in at most O(m) syndrome extraction rounds, significantly surpassing state-of-the-art lattice surgery methods. We run circuit-level simulations of depth-126 logical circuits to show that logical operations in our QLDPC codes attains near-memory performance. These results demonstrate that QLDPC codes are a viable means to reduce the resources required to implement all logical quantum algorithms, thereby unlocking a reduced timeline to commercially valuable quantum computing.

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arXiv2024

An almost-linear time decoding algorithm for quantum LDPC codes under circuit-level noise

Fault-tolerant quantum computers must be designed in conjunction with classical co-processors that decode quantum error correction measurement information in real-time. In this work, we introduce the belief propagation plus ordered Tanner forest (BP+OTF) algorithm as an almost-linear time decoder for quantum low-density parity-check codes. The OTF post-processing stage removes qubits from the decoding graph until it has a tree-like structure. Provided that the resultant loop-free OTF graph supports a subset of qubits that can generate the syndrome, BP decoding is then guaranteed to converge. To enhance performance under circuit-level noise, we introduce a technique for sparsifying detector error models. This method uses a transfer matrix to map soft information from the full detector graph to the sparsified graph, preserving critical error propagation information from the syndrome extraction circuit. Our BP+OTF implementation first applies standard BP to the full detector graph, followed by BP+OTF post-processing on the sparsified graph. Numerical simulations show that the BP+OTF decoder achieves similar logical error suppression compared to state-of-the-art inversion-based and matching decoders for bivariate bicycle and surface codes, respectively, while maintaining almost-linear runtime complexity across all stages.

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arXiv2024

Localized statistics decoding for quantum low-density parity-check codes

Quantum low-density parity-check codes are a promising candidate for fault-tolerant quantum computing with considerably reduced overhead compared to the surface code. However, the lack of a practical decoding algorithm remains a barrier to their implementation. In this work, we introduce localized statistics decoding, a reliability-guided inversion decoder that is highly parallelizable and applicable to arbitrary quantum low-density parity-check codes. Our approach employs a parallel matrix factorization strategy, which we call on-the-fly elimination, to identify, validate, and solve local decoding regions on the decoding graph. Through numerical simulations, we show that localized statistics decoding matches the performance of state-of-the-art decoders while reducing the runtime complexity for operation in the sub-threshold regime. Importantly, our decoder is more amenable to implementation on specialized hardware, positioning it as a promising candidate for decoding real-time syndromes from experiments.

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arXiv2024

High-threshold, low-overhead and single-shot decodable fault-tolerant quantum memory

We present a new family of quantum low-density parity-check codes, which we call radial codes, obtained from the lifted product of a specific subset of classical quasi-cyclic codes. The codes are defined using a pair of integers $(r,s)$ and have parameters $[\![2r^2s,2(r-1)^2,\leq2s]\!]$, with numerical studies suggesting average-case distance linear in $s$. In simulations of circuit-level noise, we observe comparable error suppression to surface codes of similar distance while using approximately five times fewer physical qubits. This is true even when radial codes are decoded using a single-shot approach, which can allow for faster logical clock speeds and reduced decoding complexity. We describe an intuitive visual representation, canonical basis of logical operators and optimal-length stabiliser measurement circuits for these codes, and argue that their error correction capabilities, tunable parameters and small size make them promising candidates for implementation on near-term quantum devices.

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arXiv2024

Analog information decoding of bosonic quantum LDPC codes

Quantum error correction is crucial for scalable quantum information processing applications. Traditional discrete-variable quantum codes that use multiple two-level systems to encode logical information can be hardware-intensive. An alternative approach is provided by bosonic codes, which use the infinite-dimensional Hilbert space of harmonic oscillators to encode quantum information. Two promising features of bosonic codes are that syndrome measurements are natively analog and that they can be concatenated with discrete-variable codes. In this work, we propose novel decoding methods that explicitly exploit the analog syndrome information obtained from the bosonic qubit readout in a concatenated architecture. Our methods are versatile and can be generally applied to any bosonic code concatenated with a quantum low-density parity-check (QLDPC) code. Furthermore, we introduce the concept of quasi-single-shot protocols as a novel approach that significantly reduces the number of repeated syndrome measurements required when decoding under phenomenological noise. To realize the protocol, we present a first implementation of time-domain decoding with the overlapping window method for general QLDPC codes, and a novel analog single-shot decoding method. Our results lay the foundation for general decoding algorithms using analog information and demonstrate promising results in the direction of fault-tolerant quantum computation with concatenated bosonic-QLDPC codes.

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arXiv2024

The domain wall color code

We introduce the domain wall color code, a new variant of the quantum error-correcting color code that exhibits exceptionally high code-capacity error thresholds for qubits subject to biased noise. In the infinite bias regime, a two-dimensional color code decouples into a series of repetition codes, resulting in an error-correcting threshold of 50%. Interestingly, at finite bias, our color code demonstrates thresholds identical to those of the noise-tailored XZZX surface code for all single-qubit Pauli noise channels. The design principle of the code is that it introduces domain walls which permute the code's excitations upon domain crossing. For practical implementation, we supplement the domain wall code with a scalable restriction decoder based on a matching algorithm. The proposed code is identified as a comparably resource-efficient quantum error-correcting code highly suitable for realistic noise.

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arXiv2023

Correcting non-independent and non-identically distributed errors with surface codes

A common approach to studying the performance of quantum error correcting codes is to assume independent and identically distributed single-qubit errors. However, the available experimental data shows that realistic errors in modern multi-qubit devices are typically neither independent nor identical across qubits. In this work, we develop and investigate the properties of topological surface codes adapted to a known noise structure by Clifford conjugations. We show that the surface code locally tailored to non-uniform single-qubit noise in conjunction with a scalable matching decoder yields an increase in error thresholds and exponential suppression of sub-threshold failure rates when compared to the standard surface code. Furthermore, we study the behaviour of the tailored surface code under local two-qubit noise and show the role that code degeneracy plays in correcting such noise. The proposed methods do not require additional overhead in terms of the number of qubits or gates and use a standard matching decoder, hence come at no extra cost compared to the standard surface-code error correction.

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arXiv2023

Graphical Structures for Design and Verification of Quantum Error Correction

We introduce a high-level graphical framework for designing and analysing quantum error correcting codes, centred on what we term the coherent parity check (CPC). The graphical formulation is based on the diagrammatic tools of the zx-calculus of quantum observables. The resulting framework leads to a construction for stabilizer codes that allows us to design and verify a broad range of quantum codes based on classical ones, and that gives a means of discovering large classes of codes using both analytical and numerical methods. We focus in particular on the smaller codes that will be the first used by near-term devices. We show how CSS codes form a subset of CPC codes and, more generally, how to compute stabilizers for a CPC code. As an explicit example of this framework, we give a method for turning almost any pair of classical [n,k,3] codes into a [[2n - k + 2, k, 3]] CPC code. Further, we give a simple technique for machine search which yields thousands of potential codes, and demonstrate its operation for distance 3 and 5 codes. Finally, we use the graphical tools to demonstrate how Clifford computation can be performed within CPC codes. As our framework gives a new tool for constructing small- to medium-sized codes with relatively high code rates, it provides a new source for codes that could be suitable for emerging devices, while its zx-calculus foundations enable natural integration of error correction with graphical compiler toolchains. It also provides a powerful framework for reasoning about all stabilizer quantum error correction codes of any size.

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arXiv2023

Bias-tailored quantum LDPC codes

Bias-tailoring allows quantum error correction codes to exploit qubit noise asymmetry. Recently, it was shown that a modified form of the surface code, the XZZX code, exhibits considerably improved performance under biased noise. In this work, we demonstrate that quantum low density parity check codes can be similarly bias-tailored. We introduce a bias-tailored lifted product code construction that provides the framework to expand bias-tailoring methods beyond the family of 2D topological codes. We present examples of bias-tailored lifted product codes based on classical quasi-cyclic codes and numerically assess their performance using a belief propagation plus ordered statistics decoder. Our Monte Carlo simulations, performed under asymmetric noise, show that bias-tailored codes achieve several orders of magnitude improvement in their error suppression relative to depolarising noise.

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arXiv2020

Decoding Across the Quantum LDPC Code Landscape

We show that belief propagation combined with ordered statistics post-processing is a general decoder for quantum low density parity check codes constructed from the hypergraph product. To this end, we run numerical simulations of the decoder applied to three families of hypergraph product code: topological codes, fixed-rate random codes and a new class of codes that we call semi-topological codes. Our new code families share properties of both topological and random hypergraph product codes, with a construction that allows for a finely-controlled trade-off between code threshold and stabilizer locality. Our results indicate thresholds across all three families of hypergraph product code, and provide evidence of exponential suppression in the low error regime. For the Toric code, we observe a threshold in the range $9.9\pm0.2\%$. This result improves upon previous quantum decoders based on belief propagation, and approaches the performance of the minimum weight perfect matching algorithm. We expect semi-topological codes to have the same threshold as Toric codes, as they are identical in the bulk, and we present numerical evidence supporting this observation.

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arXiv2020

Single-shot error correction of three-dimensional homological product codes

Single-shot error correction corrects data noise using only a single round of noisy measurements on the data qubits, removing the need for intensive measurement repetition. We introduce a general concept of confinement for quantum codes, which roughly stipulates qubit errors cannot grow without triggering more measurement syndromes. We prove confinement is sufficient for single-shot decoding of adversarial errors and linear confinement is sufficient for single-shot decoding of local stochastic errors. Further to this, we prove that all three-dimensional homological product codes exhibit confinement in their $X$-components and are therefore single-shot for adversarial phase-flip noise. For local stochastic phase-flip noise, we numerically explore these codes and again find evidence of single-shot protection. Our Monte Carlo simulations indicate sustainable thresholds of $3.08(4)\%$ and $2.90(2)\%$ for 3D surface and toric codes respectively, the highest observed single-shot thresholds to date. To demonstrate single-shot error correction beyond the class of topological codes, we also run simulations on a randomly constructed 3D homological product code.

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