Fault-Tolerance of "Bad" Quantum Low-Density Parity Check Codes

We discuss error-correction properties for families of quantum low-density parity check (LDPC) codes with relative distance that tends to zero in the limit of large blocklength. In particular, we show that any family of LDPC codes, quantum or classical, where distance scales as a positive power of the block length, $d \propto n^\alpha$, $\alpha>0$, can correct all errors with certainty if the error rate per (qu)bit is sufficiently small. We specifically analyze the case of LDPC version of the quantum hypergraph-product codes recently suggested by Tillich and Z\'emor. These codes are a finite-rate generalization of the toric codes, and, for sufficiently large quantum computers, offer an advantage over the toric codes.