Quantum Locally Testable Code with Constant Soundness

Andrew Cross1, Zhiyang He1,2, Anand Natarajan3, Mario Szegedy4, and Guanyu Zhu1

1IBM Quantum, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, United States.
2Department of Mathematics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
3Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
4Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, NJ, United States.

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Abstract

In this paper, we present two constructions of quantum locally testable codes (QLTC) with constant soundness. In the first approach, we introduce an operation called check product, and show how this operation gives rise to QLTCs of constant soundness, constant rate, and distance scaling with locality. In the second approach, we consider hypergraph product of a quantum code and a classical repetition code, and observe a special case in which the soundness of component codes is preserved. This insight leads us to construct QLTCs of constant soundness, scalable rate and distance, and constant average locality. Our work marks a step towards constructing QLTCs of high soundness and distance, which would give a different construction to the No Low-Energy Trivial States (NLTS) theorem.

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Cited by

[1] Adam Wills, Ting-Chun Lin, and Min-Hsiu Hsieh, "Tradeoff Constructions for Quantum Locally Testable Codes", IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 71 1, 426 (2025).

[2] Alexander Cowtan, Zhiyang He, Dominic J. Williamson, and Theodore J. Yoder, "Parallel Logical Measurements via Quantum Code Surgery", PRX Quantum 7 2, 020325 (2026).

[3] Victor V. Albert and Philippe Faist, "Handbook of Error-Correcting Codes", arXiv:2606.11484, (2026).

[4] Shouzhen Gu, Eugene Tang, Libor Caha, Shin Ho Choe, Zhiyang He, and Aleksander Kubica, "Single-Shot Decoding of Good Quantum LDPC Codes", Communications in Mathematical Physics 405 3, 85 (2024).

[5] Alexander Cowtan, Zhiyang He, Dominic J. Williamson, and Theodore J. Yoder, "Fast and fault-tolerant logical measurements: Auxiliary hypergraphs and transversal surgery", arXiv:2510.14895, (2025).

[6] Alexander Cowtan, Zhiyang He, Dominic J. Williamson, and Theodore J. Yoder, "Parallel Logical Measurements via Quantum Code Surgery", arXiv:2503.05003, (2025).

[7] Yiming Li, Zimu Li, Zi-Wen Liu, and Quynh T. Nguyen, "Poincaré Duality and Multiplicative Structures on Quantum Codes", arXiv:2512.21922, (2025).

[8] Eric Sabo, Lane G. Gunderman, Benjamin Ide, Michael Vasmer, and Guillaume Dauphinais, "Weight-Reduced Stabilizer Codes with Lower Overhead", PRX Quantum 5 4, 040302 (2024).

[9] Adam Wills, Ting-Chun Lin, and Min-Hsiu Hsieh, "General Distance Balancing for Quantum Locally Testable Codes", arXiv:2305.00689, (2023).

[10] Zhiyang He and Chinmay Nirkhe, "NLTS Hamiltonians from classical LTCs", arXiv:2210.02999, (2022).

[11] Adam Wills, Ting-Chun Lin, and Min-Hsiu Hsieh, "Tradeoff Constructions for Quantum Locally Testable Codes", arXiv:2309.05541, (2023).

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