Stability of Quantum LDPC States under Local Pauli Noise

Abstract

Quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes have a canonical mixed state---the normalized projector onto the code space---that lies at the intersection of quantum error correction and quantum many-body physics, yet the stability of its information-theoretic structure under local noise remains poorly understood. Recent progress on mixed-state phases of matter has identified the spatial decay of conditional mutual information (CMI) $I(A:C|B)$ as a key diagnostic of such stability, analogous to the role of the spectral gap for quantum ground states. We prove that, for the normalized code-projector state of a $\mathbb{Z}_d$ qLDPC stabilizer code under local Pauli noise, the CMI across a buffer $B$ separating $A$ from $C$ decays exponentially with the width of $B$ in two complementary noise regimes independent of system size. At weak noise, this holds for full-system tripartitions, where correlations between the two sides require an error cluster to cross the buffer, an exponentially unlikely event. At strong noise, exponential decay holds whenever the buffer supports no logical operator, since correlations can persist only along rare chains of buffer qudits that remain informative. Under an additional space-uniformity assumption, we establish the robustness of Levin--Wen topological entropy. On finite-dimensional lattices of size $n$, the weak-noise bound further implies a constant-layer quasi-local Petz recovery channel of range $O(\poly(\log n)/\varepsilon)$ that recovers the noiseless state within trace-distance error $\varepsilon$. Both CMI bounds apply to general qLDPC interaction graphs, including geometries where such constant-depth quasi-local recovery need not exist. Thus, the exponential decay of the noise-induced CMI provides a general criterion for mixed-state phase stability.