Strengthened quantum Hamming bound

Abstract: We report two analytical bounds for quantum error-correcting codes that do not have preexisting classical counterparts. Firstly the quantum Hamming and Singleton bounds are combined into a single tighter bound, and then the combined bound is further strengthened via the well-known Lloyd's theorem in classical coding theory, which claims that perfect codes, codes attaining the Hamming bound, do not exist if the Lloyd's polynomial has some non-integer zeros. Our bound characterizes quantitatively the improvement over the Hamming bound via the non-integerness of the zeros of the Lloyd's polynomial. In the case of 1-error correcting codes our bound holds true for impure codes as well, which we conjecture to be always true, and for stabilizer codes there is a 1-logical-qudit improvement for an infinite family of lengths.