Quantum error correction plays a prominent role in the realization of quantum computation, and quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes are believed to be practically useful stabilizer codes. While qLDPC codes are defined to have constant weight parity-checks, the weight of these parity checks could be large constants that make implementing these codes challenging. Large constants can also result in long syndrome extraction times and bad error propagation that can impact error correction performance. Hastings recently introduced weight reduction techniques for qLDPC codes that reduce the weight of the parity checks as well as the maximum number of checks that acts on any data qubit. However, the fault tolerance of these techniques remains an open question. In this paper, we analyze the effective distance of the weight-reduced code when single-ancilla syndrome extraction circuits are considered for error correction. We prove that there exists single-ancilla syndrome extraction circuits that largely preserve the effective distance of the weight-reduced qLDPC codes. In addition, we also show that the distance balancing technique introduced by Evra et al. preserves effective distance. As a corollary, our result shows that higher-dimensional hypergraph product (HGP) codes, also known as homological product codes corresponding to the product of 1-complexes, have no troublesome hook errors when using any single-ancilla syndrome extraction circuit.

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