Published September 25, 2025 | Version Published
Journal Article Open

Constant-Overhead Fault-Tolerant Bell-Pair Distillation Using High-Rate Codes

  • 1. ROR icon Harvard University
  • 2. ROR icon QuEra Computing (United States)
  • 3. ROR icon California Institute of Technology
  • 4. ROR icon Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • 5. ROR icon University of Chicago

Abstract

We present a fault-tolerant Bell-pair distillation scheme achieving constant overhead through high-rate quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes. Our approach maintains a constant distillation rate equal to the code rate while requiring no additional overhead beyond the physical qubits of the code. Full circuit-level analysis demonstrates fault-tolerance for input Bell-pair infidelities below a threshold ∼10%, readily achievable with near-term capabilities. Unlike previous proposals, our scheme keeps the output Bell pairs encoded in qLDPC codes at each node, eliminating unencoding overhead and enabling direct use in distributed quantum applications through recent advances in qLDPC computation. These results establish qLDPC-based distillation as a practical route toward resource-efficient quantum networks and distributed quantum computing.

Copyright and License

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.

Acknowledgement

We acknowledge helpful discussions with Andi Gu, Senrui Chen, Christopher Pattison, Siyi Yang, Dolev Bluvstein, Nishad Maskara, Marcello Laurel, Rohan Mehta, Patrick Rall, Josiah Sinclair, Nazli Ugur Koyluoglu, and Varun Menon. We acknowledge support from the ARO (Grant No. W911NF-23-1-0077), ARO MURI (Grants No. W911NF-21-1-0325 and No. W911NF-20-1-0082), AFOSR MURI (Grants No. FA9550-19-1-0399, No. FA9550-21-1-0209, and No. FA9550-23-1-0338), DARPA (Grants No. HR0011-24-9-0359 and No. HR0011-24-9-0361), NSF (Grants No. OMA-1936118, No. ERC-1941583, No. OMA-2137642, No. OSI-2326767, No. CCF-2312755, No. PHY-2012023 and No. CCF-2313084), NTT Research, Packard Foundation (Grant No. 2020-71479), the Marshall and Arlene Bennett Family Research Program, IARPA and the ARO, under the Entangled Logical Qubits Program (W911NF-23-2-0219), the Center for Ultracold Atoms (a NSF Physics Frontiers Center, PHY-1734011), and the NSF Center for Quantum networks (Grant No. EEC-1941583). This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, National Quantum Information Science Research Centers and Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) Program under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357 as part of the InterQnet quantum networking project. Q. X. is funded in part by the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics at Caltech. G. B. acknowledges support from the MIT Patrons of Physics Fellows Society.

Data Availability

The data that support the findings of this Letter are not publicly available. The data are available from the authors upon reasonable request.

Supplemental Material

The supplementary file provides additional technical details for interested readers. It includes a more in-depth review of prior work beyond what is covered in the main text, a discussion on the generality of the noise manipulation scheme presented in the main text, a detailed elaboration on the construction of the various codes implemented in our study, and additional numerical results.

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Additional details

Related works

Is new version of
Discussion Paper: arXiv:2502.09542 (arXiv)
Is supplemented by
Supplemental Material: https://journals.aps.org/prl/supplemental/10.1103/s39k-r2kq/SI.pdf (URL)

Funding

United States Army Research Office
W911NF-23-1-0077
United States Army Research Office
W911NF-21-1-0325
United States Army Research Office
W911NF-20-1-0082
United States Air Force Office of Scientific Research
FA9550-19-1-0399
United States Air Force Office of Scientific Research
FA9550-21-1-0209
United States Air Force Office of Scientific Research
FA9550-23-1-0338
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
HR0011-24-9-0359
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
HR0011-24-9-0361
National Science Foundation
OMA-1936118
National Science Foundation
ERC-1941583
National Science Foundation
OMA-2137642
National Science Foundation
OSI-2326767
National Science Foundation
CCF-2312755
National Science Foundation
PHY-2012023
National Science Foundation
CCF-2313084
NTT Research
David and Lucile Packard Foundation
2020-71479
Marshall and Arlene Bennett Family Research Program
United States Army Research Office
W911NF-23-2-0219
National Science Foundation
PHY-1734011
National Science Foundation
EEC-1941583
United States Department of Energy
DE-AC02-06CH11357
California Institute of Technology

Dates

Accepted
2025-08-18

Caltech Custom Metadata

Caltech groups
Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics, Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy (PMA)
Publication Status
Published