Bounds on stabilizer measurement circuits and obstructions to local implementations of quantum LDPC codes

In this work we establish lower bounds on the size of Clifford circuits that measure a family of commuting Pauli operators. Our bounds depend on the interplay between a pair of graphs: the Tanner graph of the set of measured Pauli operators, and the connectivity graph which represents the qubit connections required to implement the circuit. For local-expander quantum codes, which are promising for low-overhead quantum error correction, we prove that any syndrome extraction circuit implemented with local Clifford gates in a 2D square patch of $N$ qubits has depth at least $\Omega(n/\sqrt{N})$ where $n$ is the code length. Then, we propose two families of quantum circuits saturating this bound. First, we construct 2D local syndrome extraction circuits for quantum LDPC codes with bounded depth using only $O(n^2)$ ancilla qubits. Second, we design a family of 2D local syndrome extraction circuits for hypergraph product codes using $O(n)$ ancilla qubits with depth $O(\sqrt{n})$. Finally, we use circuit noise simulations to compare the performance of a family of hypergraph product codes using this last family of 2D syndrome extraction circuits with a syndrome extraction circuit implemented with fully connected qubits. While there is a threshold of about $10^{-3}$ for a fully connected implementation, we observe no threshold for the 2D local implementation despite simulating error rates of as low as $10^{-6}$. This suggests that quantum LDPC codes are impractical with 2D local quantum hardware. We believe that our proof technique is of independent interest and could find other applications. Our bounds on circuit sizes are derived from a lower bound on the amount of correlations between two subsets of qubits of the circuit and an upper bound on the amount of correlations introduced by each circuit gate, which together provide a lower bound on the circuit size.