High-Rate Concatenated Quantum Error-Correcting Codes for Qudits

Abstract: Qudits provide a larger local Hilbert space than qubits and have recently attracted interest as building blocks for efficient fault-tolerant quantum computation (FTQC). In this work, we extend many-hypercube (MHC) codes, high-rate concatenated quantum codes, from qubits to qudits of prime dimension $q$. We construct the level-2 and level-3 MHC codes with parameters $$\left[!\left[6<sup>2,4<sup>2,2<sup>2\right]!\right]_q$$ and $$\left[!\left[6<sup>3,4<sup>3,2<sup>3\right]!\right]_q$$, respectively, and generalize the level-by-level minimum-distance (LLMD) decoder originally proposed for the qubit MHC codes. In a qudit $X$-error model, we evaluate the code-capacity performance of the qudit MHC codes for dimensions up to $q=13$. We find that the error threshold increases monotonically with the local dimension $q$, reaching $10.0\%$ for $q=13$, nearly double the value of $5.1\%$ for qubits. Furthermore, for sufficiently large local dimensions, we observe a pronounced waterfall regime in which the logical error rate decreases substantially faster than expected from conventional distance-based estimates. To understand the origin of the observed qudit advantage, we analyze the decoding performance in terms of the entropy of the underlying $q$-ary noise channel. This analysis reveals a competition between the increased syndrome information available at larger $q$ and the simultaneous growth of the typical physical error weight at fixed entropy. These results demonstrate that higher-dimensional quantum systems can substantially improve the performance of high-rate concatenated quantum codes and motivate further development of qudit-based FTQC architectures.