The Road From Classical to Quantum Codes: A Hashing Bound Approaching Design Procedure

Powerful quantum error correction codes (QECCs) are required for stabilizing and protecting fragile qubits against the undesirable effects of quantum decoherence. Similar to classical codes, hashing bound approaching QECCs may be designed by exploiting a concatenated code structure, which invokes iterative decoding. Therefore, in this paper, we provide an extensive step-by-step tutorial for designing extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) chart-aided concatenated quantum codes based on the underlying quantum-to-classical isomorphism. These design lessons are then exemplified in the context of our proposed quantum irregular convolutional code (QIRCC), which constitutes the outer component of a concatenated quantum code. The proposed QIRCC can be dynamically adapted to match any given inner code using EXIT charts, hence achieving a performance close to the hashing bound. It is demonstrated that our QIRCC-based optimized design is capable of operating within 0.4 dB of the noise limit.