Quasi-cyclic low-density parity-check stabilizer codes

Abstract

Quantum error correction codes are needed to protect quantum systems from interference. An important family of quantum error correction codes are stabilizer codes. Many stabilizer codes in the literature belong to a subclass of stabilizer codes, referred to as CSS codes since they are based on the so-called CSS formalism. CSS codes have received significant attention because the dual-containing condition for the CSS formalism is relatively straightforward to satisfy and also because it is easy to produce CSS codes from classical error correction codes. However, some stabilizer codes in the literature show superior error correction performance than existing CSS codes, and are based on binary low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. Since it has been shown that CSS codes based on nonbinary LDPC codes have good performance over quantum qubit channels, in this paper we investigate stabilizer codes based on nonbinary LDPC codes. In particular, we propose constructions of stabilizer codes based on nonbinary quasi-cyclic low-density parity-check (QC-LDPC) codes for qubit channels. The simulation results show that our QC-LDPC stabilizer codes decoded by a nonbinary sum-product algorithm have better performance than their binary counterparts.