Fault tolerance of quantum circuits with tensor networks and symplectic geometry
quant-ph
Submitted: 2026-10-02
Updated: 2026-10-02
Comments: 46 pages, 5 figures
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: We develop an operator-algebraic framework for analyzing fault tolerance in quantum circuits and establish necessary and sufficient conditions for fault tolerance under any given noise model.
Terminology
Abstract
We develop an operator-algebraic framework for analyzing fault tolerance in quantum circuits and establish necessary and sufficient conditions for fault tolerance under any given noise model. For prescribed circuit families and noise models, we derive a semidefinite program (SDP) based test whose infeasibility certifies that there does not exist any recovery map restoring its intended operation. For non-adaptive stabilizer circuits, analyzing the stabilizer symmetries of its components with symplectic geometry, we obtain closed-form detection and logical-effect matrices that characterize circuit distance algebraically. Applied to a finite Hastings--Haah honeycomb Floquet-code circuit, these matrices certify the dynamical encoding of two logical qubits and distance four under Pauli noise including measurement errors. Using these matrices, we then derive MacWilliams identities for circuit weight enumerators and obtain linear-programming (LP) upper bounds on circuit distance. Output-code constraints give additional Singleton-like bounds. Under independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) depolarizing noise, the weight enumerators determine decoder failure probabilities and yield upper bounds on finite-circuit pseudothresholds. Finally, we derive LP distance bounds for families of flag syndrome-extraction circuits specified by their CNOT orderings, by incorporating the t-flag criterion as additional linear constraints to the distance-bounding LP. An analytical CSS Hamming-code benchmark yields a tight distance-three bound attained by the Chao--Reichardt one-flag construction.
Sources
- Fault-tolerant quantum computation
- Opportunities and Challenges in Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computation
- Stabilizer Codes and Quantum Error Correction
- Fault-tolerant syndrome extraction and cat state preparation with fewer qubits
- Fault-tolerant quantum error correction for Steane's seven-qubit color code with few or no extra qubits
- Parallel syndrome extraction with shared flag qubits for Calderbank-Shor-Steane codes of distance three
- A Theory of Quantum Error-Correcting Codes
- Quantum fault tolerance with constant-space and logarithmic-time overheads
- Approximate simulation of quantum channels
- Fault tolerance of stabilizer channels
- Flag fault-tolerant error correction with arbitrary distance codes
- A comparative code study for quantum fault-tolerance
- Strategic Code: A Unified Spatio-Temporal Framework for Quantum Error-Correction
- Theoretical framework for quantum networks
- Fault Tolerance by Construction
- Designing fault-tolerant circuits using detector error models
- Distance-Finding Algorithms for Quantum Codes and Circuits
- On the Hardness of the Minimum Distance Problem of Quantum Codes
- Dynamically Generated Logical Qubits
- Optimization tools for distance-preserving flag fault-tolerant error correction
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