Bounds on concatenated entanglement-assisted quantum error-correcting codes

Abstract

Code concatenation combines two or more component codes to design larger codes with greater noise resilience. Introducing entanglement assistance to concatenated codes provides a further advantage in terms of improved error rates and beating certain bounds on codes that would otherwise be unbeatable. First, we derive the general expression for the shared entanglement of a concatenated code and show that the number of ebits can depend on the order of concatenating the component entanglement-assisted quantum error-correcting codes (EAQECCs). We further construct families of pairs of EAQECCs such that the number of ebits of the resultant of concatenating the two codes in a given pair is order independent. Second, we derive conditions on code distance under which non-maximal-entanglement EAQECCs obtained from a classical quaternary Griesmer or Plotkin code saturate the entanglement-assisted (EA) Griesmer or linear EA Plotkin bound, respectively, extending the known result for maximal-entanglement EAQECCs. Furthermore, we present several families of such nonmaximal-entanglement EAQECCs. Third, we derive an EA version of the quantum Griesmer-Rains bound on the number of correctable errors for EAQECCs. Finally, we present families of pairs of EAQECCs such that the violation of the EA Hamming bound by the resultant of concatenating the two codes in a given pair is order dependent.