English

Bidirectional Decoding for Concatenated Quantum Hamming Codes

Quantum Physics 2026-01-15 v1

Abstract

High-rate concatenated quantum codes offer a promising pathway toward fault-tolerant quantum computation, yet designing efficient decoders that fully exploit their error-correction capability remains a significant challenge. In this work, we introduce a hard-decision decoder for concatenated quantum Hamming codes with time complexity polynomial in the block length. This decoder overcomes the limitations of conventional local decoding by leveraging higher-level syndrome information to revise lower-level recovery decisions -- a strategy we refer to as bidirectional decoding. For the concatenated [[15,7,3]][[15,7,3]] quantum Hamming code under independent bit-flip noise, the bidirectional decoder improves the threshold from approximately 1.56%1.56\% to 4.35%4.35\% compared with standard local decoding. Moreover, the decoder empirically preserves the full 3L3^{L} code-distance scaling for at least three levels of concatenation, resulting in substantially faster logical-error suppression than the 2L+12^{L+1} scaling offered by local decoders. Our results can enhance the competitiveness of concatenated-code architectures for low-overhead fault-tolerant quantum computation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.09131,
  title  = {Bidirectional Decoding for Concatenated Quantum Hamming Codes},
  author = {Chao Zhang and Zipeng Wu and Jiahui Wu and Shilin Huang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.09131},
  year   = {2026}
}