Subsystem many-hypercube codes: High-rate concatenated codes with low-weight syndrome measurements

Quantum error-correcting codes (QECCs) require high encoding rate in addition to high threshold unless a sufficiently large number of physical qubits are available. The many-hypercube (MHC) codes defined as the concatenation of the [[6,4,2]] quantum error-detecting code have been proposed as high-performance and high-encoding-rate QECCs. However, the concatenated codes have a disadvantage that the syndrome weight grows exponentially with respect to the concatenation level. To address this issue, here we propose subsystem quantum codes based on the MHC codes. In particular, we study the smallest subsystem MHC codes, namely, subsystem codes derived from the concatenated [[4,2,2]] error-detecting codes. The resulting codes have a constant syndrome-measurement weight of 4, while keeping high encoding rates. We build the block-MAP and neural-network decoders and show that they demonstrate superior performance to the bounded-distance decoder.