Some classes of concatenated quantum codes: constructions and lower bounds

Abstract

In classical coding theory code concatenation is successfully used to construct good errorcorrecting codes and most of the asymptotically good codes known so far are based on concatenation. In this paper we present some classes of asymptotically good concatenated quantum codes, which are a quantum analogue of classical concatenated codes, and derive lower bounds on the minimum distance and the rate of the codes. Our bounds improve on the best lower bound of Ashikhmin–Litsyn–Tsfasman and Matsumoto for rates smaller than about one half. We also give a polynomial-time decoding algorithm for the codes that can decode up to one fourth of the lower bound on the minimum distance of the codes.