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Paper 1

Hierarchical quantum decoders

Nirupam Basak, Ankith Mohan, Andrew Tanggara, Tobias Haug, Goutam Paul, Kishor Bharti

Year

2026

Journal

arXiv preprint

DOI

arXiv:2601.21715

arXiv

2601.21715

Decoders are a critical component of fault-tolerant quantum computing. They must identify errors based on syndrome measurements to correct quantum states. While finding the optimal correction is NP-hard and thus extremely difficult, approximate decoders with faster runtime often rely on uncontrolled heuristics. In this work, we propose a family of hierarchical quantum decoders with a tunable trade-off between speed and accuracy while retaining guarantees of optimality. We use the Lasserre Sum-of-Squares (SOS) hierarchy from optimization theory to relax the decoding problem. This approach creates a sequence of Semidefinite Programs (SDPs). Lower levels of the hierarchy are faster but approximate, while higher levels are slower but more accurate. We demonstrate that even low levels of this hierarchy significantly outperform standard Linear Programming relaxations. Our results on rotated surface codes and honeycomb color codes show that the SOS decoder approaches the performance of exact decoding. We find that Levels 2 and 3 of our hierarchy perform nearly as well as the exact solver. We analyze the convergence using rank-loop criteria and compare the method against other relaxation schemes. This work bridges the gap between fast heuristics and rigorous optimal decoding.

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Paper 2

Fast surgery for quantum LDPC codes

Nouédyn Baspin, Lucas Berent, Lawrence Z. Cohen

Year

2025

Journal

arXiv preprint

DOI

arXiv:2510.04521

arXiv

2510.04521

Quantum LDPC codes promise significant reductions in physical qubit overhead compared with topological codes. However, many existing constructions for performing logical operations come with distance-dependent temporal overheads. We introduce a scheme for performing generalized surgery on quantum LDPC codes using a constant number of rounds of syndrome measurement. The merged code in our scheme is constructed by taking the total complex of the base code and a suitably chosen homomorphic chain complex. We demonstrate the applicability of our scheme on an example multi-cycle code and assess the performance under a phenomenological noise model, showing that fast surgery performs comparably to standard generalized surgery with multiple rounds. Our results pave the way towards fault-tolerant quantum computing with LDPC codes with both low spatial and temporal overheads.

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