Entanglement-assisted quantum codes achieving the quantum singleton bound but violating the quantum Hamming bound

We give an infinite family of degenerate entanglement-assisted quantum error-correcting codes (EAQECCs) which violate the EA-quantum Hamming bound for non-degenerate EAQECCs and achieve the EA-quantum Singleton bound, thereby proving that the EA-quantum Hamming bound does not asymptotically hold for degenerate EAQECCs. Unlike the previously known quantum error-correcting codes that violate the quantum Hamming bound by exploiting maximally entangled pairs of qubits, our codes do not require local unitary operations on the entangled auxiliary qubits during encoding. The degenerate EAQECCs we present are constructed from classical error-correcting codes with poor minimum distances, which implies that, unlike the majority of known EAQECCs with large minimum distances, our EAQECCs take more advantage of degeneracy and rely less on the error correction capabilities of classical codes.