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Nikolas P. Breuckmann

Publications and source records attributed to Nikolas P. Breuckmann.

36 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Fault-Tolerant Connection of Error-Corrected Qubits with Noisy Links

One of the most promising routes towards scalable quantum computing is a modular approach. We show that distinct surface code patches can be connected in a fault-tolerant manner even in the presence of substantial noise along their connecting interface. We quantify analytically and numerically the combined effect of errors across the interface and bulk. We show that the system can tolerate 14 times higher noise at the interface compared to the bulk, with only a small effect on the code's threshold and sub-threshold behavior, reaching threshold with $\sim 1 \%$ bulk errors and $\sim 10 \%$ interface errors. This implies that fault-tolerant scaling of error-corrected modular devices is within reach using existing technology.

quant-ph↗

A construction of Combinatorial NLTS

The NLTS (No Low-Energy Trivial State) conjecture of Freedman and Hastings [2014] posits that there exist families of Hamiltonians with all low energy states of high complexity (with complexity measured by the quantum circuit depth preparing the state). Here, we prove a weaker version called the combinatorial NLTS, where a quantum circuit lower bound is shown against states that violate a (small) constant fraction of local terms. This generalizes the prior NLETS results (Eldar and Harrow [2017]; Nirkhe, Vazirani and Yuen [2018]). Our construction is obtained by combining tensor networks with expander codes (Sipser and Spielman [1996]). The Hamiltonian is the parent Hamiltonian of a perturbed tensor network, inspired by the `uncle Hamiltonian' of Fernandez-Gonzalez et. al. [2015]. Thus, we deviate from the quantum CSS code Hamiltonians considered in most prior works.

quant-ph↗

Quantum Pin Codes

We introduce quantum pin codes: a class of quantum CSS codes. Quantum pin codes are a generalization of quantum color codes and Reed-Muller codes and share a lot of their structure and properties. Pin codes have gauge operators, an unfolding procedure and their stabilizers form so-called $\ell$-orthogonal spaces meaning that the joint overlap between any $\ell$ stabilizer elements is always even. This last feature makes them interesting for devising magic-state distillation protocols, for instance by using puncturing techniques. We study examples of these codes and their properties.

quant-ph↗

Quantum Low-Density Parity-Check Codes

Quantum error correction is an indispensable ingredient for scalable quantum computing. In this Perspective we discuss a particular class of quantum codes called low-density parity-check (LDPC) quantum codes. The codes we discuss are alternatives to the surface code, which is the currently leading candidate to implement quantum fault-tolerance. We introduce the zoo of LDPC quantum codes and discuss their potential for making quantum computers robust against noise. In particular, we explain recent advances in the theory of LDPC quantum codes related to certain product constructions and discuss open problems in the field.

quant-ph↗

Subsystem codes with high thresholds by gauge fixing and reduced qubit overhead

We introduce a technique that uses gauge fixing to significantly improve the quantum error correcting performance of subsystem codes. By changing the order in which check operators are measured, valuable additional information can be gained, and we introduce a new method for decoding which uses this information to improve performance. Applied to the subsystem toric code with three-qubit check operators, we increase the threshold under circuit-level depolarising noise from $0.67\%$ to $0.81\%$. The threshold increases further under a circuit-level noise model with small finite bias, up to $2.22\%$ for infinite bias. Furthermore, we construct families of finite-rate subsystem LDPC codes with three-qubit check operators and optimal-depth parity-check measurement schedules. To the best of our knowledge, these finite-rate subsystem codes outperform all known codes at circuit-level depolarising error rates as high as $0.2\%$, where they have a qubit overhead that is $4.3\times$ lower than the most efficient version of the surface code and $5.1\times$ lower than the subsystem toric code. Their threshold and pseudo-threshold exceeds $0.42\%$ for circuit-level depolarising noise, increasing to $2.4\%$ under infinite bias using gauge fixing.

quant-ph↗

Balanced Product Quantum Codes

This work provides the first explicit and non-random family of $[[N,K,D]]$ LDPC quantum codes which encode $K \in Θ(N^\frac{4}{5})$ logical qubits with distance $D \in Ω(N^\frac{3}{5})$. The family is constructed by amalgamating classical codes and Ramanujan graphs via an operation called balanced product. Recently, Hastings-Haah-O'Donnell and Panteleev-Kalachev were the first to show that there exist families of LDPC quantum codes which break the $\operatorname{polylog}(N)\sqrt{N}$ distance barrier. However, their constructions are based on probabilistic arguments which only guarantee the code parameters with high probability whereas our bounds hold unconditionally. Further, balanced products allow for non-abelian twisting of the check matrices, leading to a construction of LDPC quantum codes that can be shown to have $K\in Θ(N)$ and that we conjecture to have linear distance $D\in Θ(N)$.

quant-ph↗

Quantum phase transitions of interacting bosons on hyperbolic lattices

The effect of many-body interaction in curved space is studied based on the extended Bose--Hubbard model on hyperbolic lattices. Using the mean-field approximation and quantum Monte Carlo simulation, the phase diagram is explicitly mapped out, which contains the superfluid, supersolid and insulator phases at various fillings. Particularly, it is revealed that the sizes of the Mott lobes shrink and the supersolid is stabilized at smaller nearest-neighbor interaction as $q$ in the Schläfli symbol increases. The underlying physical mechanism is attributed to the increase of the coordination number, and hence the kinetic energy and the nearest-neighbor interaction. The results suggest that the hyperbolic lattices may be a unique platform to study the effect of the coordination number on quantum phase transitions, which may be relevant to the experiments of ultracold atoms in optical lattices.

cond-mat.str-el↗

Critical properties of the Ising model in hyperbolic space

The Ising model exhibits qualitatively different properties in hyperbolic space in comparison to its flat space counterpart. Due to the negative curvature, a finite fraction of the total number of spins reside at the boundary of a volume in hyperbolic space. As a result, boundary conditions play an important role even when taking the thermodynamic limit. We investigate the bulk thermodynamic properties of the Ising model in two and three dimensional hyperbolic spaces using Monte Carlo and high and low-temperature series expansion techniques. To extract the true bulk properties of the model in the Monte Carlo computations, we consider the Ising model in hyperbolic space with periodic boundary conditions. We compute the critical exponents and critical temperatures for different tilings of the hyperbolic plane and show that the results are of mean-field nature. We compare our results to the 'asymptotic' limit of tilings of the hyperbolic plane: the Bethe lattice, explaining the relationship between the critical properties of the Ising model on Bethe and hyperbolic lattices. Finally, we analyze the Ising model on three dimensional hyperbolic space using Monte Carlo and high-temperature series expansion. In contrast to recent field theory calculations, which predict a non-mean-field fixed point for the ferromagnetic-paramagnetic phase-transition of the Ising model on three-dimensional hyperbolic space, our computations reveal a mean-field behavior.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

Single-Shot Decoding of Linear Rate LDPC Quantum Codes with High Performance

We construct and analyze a family of low-density parity check (LDPC) quantum codes with a linear encoding rate, polynomial scaling distance and efficient decoding schemes. The code family is based on tessellations of closed, four-dimensional, hyperbolic manifolds, as first suggested by Guth and Lubotzky. The main contribution of this work is the construction of suitable manifolds via finite presentations of Coxeter groups, their linear representations over Galois fields and topological coverings. We establish a lower bound on the encoding rate~k/n of~13/72 = 0.180... and we show that the bound is tight for the examples that we construct. Numerical simulations give evidence that parallelizable decoding schemes of low computational complexity suffice to obtain high performance. These decoding schemes can deal with syndrome noise, so that parity check measurements do not have to be repeated to decode. Our data is consistent with a threshold of around 4% in the phenomenological noise model with syndrome noise in the single-shot regime.

quant-ph↗

Machine learning logical gates for quantum error correction

Quantum error correcting codes protect quantum computation from errors caused by decoherence and other noise. Here we study the problem of designing logical operations for quantum error correcting codes. We present an automated procedure which generates logical operations given known encoding and correcting procedures. Our technique is to use variational circuits for learning both the logical gates and the physical operations implementing them. This procedure can be implemented on near-term quantum computers via quantum process tomography. It enables automatic discovery of logical gates from analytically designed error correcting codes and can be extended to error correcting codes found by numerical optimizations. We test the procedure by simulation on classical computers on small quantum codes of four qubits to fifteen qubits and show that it finds most logical gates known in the current literature. Additionally, it generates logical gates not found in the current literature for the [[5,1,2]] code, the [[6,3,2]] code, and the [[8,3,2]] code.

quant-ph↗

Scalable Neural Network Decoders for Higher Dimensional Quantum Codes

Machine learning has the potential to become an important tool in quantum error correction as it allows the decoder to adapt to the error distribution of a quantum chip. An additional motivation for using neural networks is the fact that they can be evaluated by dedicated hardware which is very fast and consumes little power. Machine learning has been previously applied to decode the surface code. However, these approaches are not scalable as the training has to be redone for every system size which becomes increasingly difficult. In this work the existence of local decoders for higher dimensional codes leads us to use a low-depth convolutional neural network to locally assign a likelihood of error on each qubit. For noiseless syndrome measurements, numerical simulations show that the decoder has a threshold of around $7.1\%$ when applied to the 4D toric code. When the syndrome measurements are noisy, the decoder performs better for larger code sizes when the error probability is low. We also give theoretical and numerical analysis to show how a convolutional neural network is different from the 1-nearest neighbor algorithm, which is a baseline machine learning method.

quant-ph↗

The Small Stellated Dodecahedron Code and Friends

We explore a distance-3 homological CSS quantum code, namely the small stellated dodecahedron code, for dense storage of quantum information and we compare its performance with the distance-3 surface code. The data and ancilla qubits of the small stellated dodecahedron code can be located on the edges resp. vertices of a small stellated dodecahedron, making this code suitable for 3D connectivity. This code encodes 8 logical qubits into 30 physical qubits (plus 22 ancilla qubits for parity check measurements) as compared to 1 logical qubit into 9 physical qubits (plus 8 ancilla qubits) for the surface code. We develop fault-tolerant parity check circuits and a decoder for this code, allowing us to numerically assess the circuit-based pseudo-threshold.

quant-ph↗

PhD thesis: Homological Quantum Codes Beyond the Toric Code

PhD thesis investigating homological quantum codes derived from curved and higher dimensional geometries. In the first part we will consider closed surfaces with constant negative curvature. We show how such surfaces can be constructed and enumerate all quantum codes derived from them which have less than 10.000 physical qubits. For codes that are extremal in a certain sense we perform numerical simulations to determine the value of their threshold. Furthermore, we give evidence that these codes can be used for more overhead efficient storage as compared to the surface code by orders of magnitude. We also show how to read and write the encoded qubits while keeping their connectivity low. In the second part we consider codes in which qubits are layed-out according to a four- dimensional geometry. Such codes allow for much simpler decoding schemes compared to codes which are two-dimensional. In particular, measurements do not necessarily have to be repeated to obtain reliable information about the error and the classical hardware performing the error correction is greatly simplified. We perform numerical simulations to analyze the performance of these codes using decoders based on local updates. We also introduce a novel decoder based on techniques from machine learning and image recognition to decode four-dimensional codes.

quant-ph↗

Renormalization group decoder for a four-dimensional toric code

We describe a computationally-efficient heuristic algorithm based on a renormalization-group procedure which aims at solving the problem of finding minimal surface given its boundary (curve) in any hypercubic lattice of dimension $D>2$. We use this algorithm to correct errors occurring in a four-dimensional variant of the toric code, having open as opposed to periodic boundaries. For a phenomenological error model which includes measurement errors we use a five-dimensional version of our algorithm, achieving a threshold of $4.35\pm0.1\%$. For this error model, this is the highest known threshold of any topological code. Without measurement errors, a four-dimensional version of our algorithm can be used and we find a threshold of $7.3\pm0.1\%$. For the gate-based depolarizing error model we find a threshold of $0.31\pm0.01\%$ which is below the threshold found for the two-dimensional toric code.

quant-ph↗

Hyperbolic and Semi-Hyperbolic Surface Codes for Quantum Storage

We show how a hyperbolic surface code could be used for overhead-efficient quantum storage. We give numerical evidence for a noise threshold of 1.3% for the {4,5}-hyperbolic surface code in a phenomenological noise model (as compared to 2.9% for the toric code). In this code family parity checks are of weight 4 and 5 while each qubit participates in 4 different parity checks. We introduce a family of semi-hyperbolic codes which interpolate between the toric code and the {4,5}-hyperbolic surface code in terms of encoding rate and threshold. We show how these hyperbolic codes outperform the toric code in terms of qubit overhead for a target logical error probability. We show how Dehn twists and lattice code surgery can be used to read and write individual qubits to this quantum storage medium.

quant-ph↗

Local Decoders for the 2D and 4D Toric Code

We analyze the performance of decoders for the 2D and 4D toric code which are local by construction. The 2D decoder is a cellular automaton decoder formulated by Harrington which explicitly has a finite speed of communication and computation. For a model of independent $X$ and $Z$ errors and faulty syndrome measurements with identical probability we report a threshold of $0.133\%$ for this Harrington decoder. We implement a decoder for the 4D toric code which is based on a decoder by Hastings arXiv:1312.2546 . Incorporating a method for handling faulty syndromes we estimate a threshold of $1.59\%$ for the same noise model as in the 2D case. We compare the performance of this decoder with a decoder based on a 4D version of Toom's cellular automaton rule as well as the decoding method suggested by Dennis et al. arXiv:quant-ph/0110143 .

quant-ph↗

Constructions and Noise Threshold of Hyperbolic Surface Codes

We show how to obtain concrete constructions of homological quantum codes based on tilings of 2D surfaces with constant negative curvature (hyperbolic surfaces). This construction results in two-dimensional quantum codes whose tradeoff of encoding rate versus protection is more favorable than for the surface code. These surface codes would require variable length connections between qubits, as determined by the hyperbolic geometry. We provide numerical estimates of the value of the noise threshold and logical error probability of these codes against independent X or Z noise, assuming noise-free error correction.

quant-ph↗

Space-Time Circuit-to-Hamiltonian Construction and Its Applications

The circuit-to-Hamiltonian construction translates dynamics (a quantum circuit and its output) into statics (the groundstate of a circuit Hamiltonian) by explicitly defining a quantum register for a clock. The standard Feynman-Kitaev construction uses one global clock for all qubits while we consider a different construction in which a clock is assigned to each interacting qubit. This makes it possible to capture the spatio-temporal structure of the original quantum circuit into features of the circuit Hamiltonian. The construction is inspired by the original two-dimensional interacting fermionic model (see http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevA.63.040302) We prove that for one-dimensional quantum circuits the gap of the circuit Hamiltonian is appropriately lower-bounded, partially using results on mixing times of Markov chains, so that the applications of this construction for QMA (and partially for quantum adiabatic computation) go through. For one-dimensional quantum circuits, the dynamics generated by the circuit Hamiltonian corresponds to diffusion of a string around the torus.

quant-ph↗