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Paper 1

Beam search decoder for quantum LDPC codes

Min Ye, Dave Wecker, Nicolas Delfosse

Year
2025
Journal
arXiv preprint
DOI
arXiv:2512.07057
arXiv
2512.07057

We propose a decoder for quantum low density parity check (LDPC) codes based on a beam search heuristic guided by belief propagation (BP). Our beam search decoder applies to all quantum LDPC codes and achieves different speed-accuracy tradeoffs by tuning its parameters such as the beam width. We perform numerical simulations under circuit level noise for the $[[144, 12, 12]]$ bivariate bicycle (BB) code at noise rate $p=10^{-3}$ to estimate the logical error rate and the 99.9 percentile runtime and we compare with the BP-OSD decoder which has been the default quantum LDPC decoder for the past six years. A variant of our beam search decoder with a beam width of 64 achieves a $17\times$ reduction in logical error rate. With a beam width of 8, we reach the same logical error rate as BP-OSD with a $26.2\times$ reduction in the 99.9 percentile runtime. We identify the beam search decoder with beam width of 32 as a promising candidate for trapped ion architectures because it achieves a $5.6\times$ reduction in logical error rate with a 99.9 percentile runtime per syndrome extraction round below 1ms at $p=5 \times10^{-4}$. Remarkably, this is achieved in software on a single core, without any parallelization or specialized hardware (FPGA, ASIC), suggesting one might only need three 32-core CPUs to decode a trapped ion quantum computer with 1000 logical qubits.

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Paper 2

Absence of quantum Darwinism as a resource in secure quantum communication and computation

Bishal Kumar Das, Sourav Manna, Vaibhav Madhok

Year
2025
Journal
arXiv preprint
DOI
arXiv:2510.03225
arXiv
2510.03225

The emergence of classical world from underlying quantum mechanics is characterized by not only vanishing quantum correlations but also an unfolding of objectivity also known as quantum Darwinism. We show that the absence of this objectivity has a quantum advantage in cryptography and also provides the crucial missing link in efficient classical simulation of quantum circuits with zero discord. For this purpose, we consider a model of mixed state quantum computation where one is promised concordant states at all stages of the quantum circuit. A concordant quantum state has zero discord with respect to any part and there exists a basis made up of a tensor product of orthonormal local subsystem basis in which the density matrix is diagonal. Efficient classical simulation of concordant computation has surprisingly been an outstanding question in quantum information theory. We argue that a key ingredient of an efficient classical simulation algorithm, a knowledge of the local basis in which the multi-party state is diagonal, is made available by quantum Darwinism. Concordant states in the absence of quantum Darwinism cannot be efficiently simulated by existing methods and give a cryptographic advantage in communication. We show this by giving a protocol for secure quantum communication that exploits this insight. Our work also has implications for the quantum-classical border and we discuss how objectivity emerging out of Darwinism demarcates this border in three ways - empirical based on our observations and experience of objectivity, information theoretic due to the absence of any quantum correlations and lastly computational in the sense discussed above. Lastly, we show that the quantum-classical boundary as drawn by quantum Darwinism as well by what can be simulated efficiently in a mixed state quantum computation aligns with the boundary given by Hardy

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