High-rate qLDPC processors

Abstract

Despite significant progress on quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes, building qLDPC processors that are high-rate, high-throughput, hardware-friendly, and fast-to-decode remains a challenge. We introduce mitten codes, a family of qLDPC processor codes of encoding rate $20\%$ and check weight $9$, based on non-abelian groups. Their non-abelian structure evades distance bounds constraining abelian counterparts, allowing mitten codes to reach distance $18$ and beyond with just a few hundred data qubits. The logical operators of a mitten code are related by the group action, yielding a modular, low-overhead logical toolkit: full Clifford operations follow from bridging two reusable seed surgery gadgets or from a single fixed extractor. Furthermore, qLDPC processors based on mitten codes support high-rate surgery that executes many logical measurements in parallel, and parallel magic-state injection into all logical qubits at once. Under circuit-level noise, with our fast decoder, the $[\![300,60,14]\!]$ mitten code achieves, without extrapolation, a block logical error rate of ${\sim}10^{-11}$ per round at $0.1\%$ physical error rate (PER), while the $[\![ 975,195,\leq 24 ]\!]$ code reaches ${\sim}10^{-8}$ at $0.4\%$ PER. Decoding $15$ billion surgery experiments on the $[\![540,108,18]\!]$ code at $0.1\%$ PER, we observe only two logical failures, demonstrating a qLDPC processor capable of running ${\sim}10^{10}$ logical operations. Our decoder is compatible with sub-millisecond average latency per logical cycle, sufficient for real-time decoding on neutral atom hardware. Discovered by an end-to-end design pipeline built on sQetch, a distance estimator orders of magnitude faster than existing tools, and mapping efficiently onto near-term neutral atom and superconducting hardware, mitten codes open a practical path toward fault-tolerant quantum computation.