Single-shot and two-shot decoding with generalized bicycle codes

Abstract: Generalized-bicycle (GB) quantum error-correcting codes have naturally redundant minimum-weight stabilizer generators. To use this redundancy, we constructed several short GB codes with relatively large dimensions, distances, and syndrome distances, also admitting fault-tolerant near-time-optimal syndrome measurement schedules. We simulated their performance both under phenomenological noise and standard circuit noise, using sliding window sequential decoding protocol covering $T\ge 1$ measurement rounds at a time, based on an in-house binary BP+OSD decoder. While true single-shot decoding ($T=1$) may suffer from a significant loss of accuracy, already two-shot ($T=2$) decoding gives nearly the same logical error rates as multi-shot with much larger $T$. Comparison with the same codes but redundant stabilizer generators dropped show significantly improved decoding accuracy for all $T\ge1$.