CALABASAS, Calif., May 28, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- The SSMTheory Group at IDrive Inc. today announced a series of research papers in quantum information science, headlined by a new high-rate quantum error-correcting code and two peer-reviewed publications in Physics Open, an open-access physics journal published by Elsevier. The work, authored by IDrive researcher Raghu Kulkarni, applies the geometry of densely packed three-dimensional crystals to long-standing problems in quantum computing and theoretical physics.

A high-rate code on the densest 3D lattice

The central technical result is a quantum error-correcting code built on the Face-Centered Cubic (FCC) lattice — the densest possible packing of spheres in three dimensions, the arrangement at the heart of the Kepler conjecture. By placing quantum bits on the edges of this lattice, where every site connects to twelve neighbors, the construction encodes 130 logical qubits into 192 physical qubits, an encoding rate of roughly 67 percent. The code's properties are verified computationally, and the paper includes self-contained code that reproduces every reported result in under a minute on a standard laptop.

High encoding rate is one of the central goals in quantum error correction, where the overhead of protecting quantum information is a major obstacle to building practical machines. The code achieves its high rate at a fixed error-correcting distance, placing it at a different point on the rate-versus-distance spectrum than codes optimized for large-scale error suppression. The paper presents it as a reproducible construction on a physically realizable lattice — one that could in principle be implemented on neutral-atom, photonic, or superconducting hardware.

This result is available as a preprint on arXiv (arXiv:2603.20294).

Extending the framework to fundamental physics

Building on the same FCC geometry, two further papers — both peer-reviewed and published in Physics Open — apply the model to the properties of elementary particles, treating the physical vacuum as a quantum error-correcting code on the FCC lattice.

The first, The Mass-Energy-Information Equivalence, models particles as defects in the code and identifies a particle's mass with the thermodynamic cost of verifying that defect, building on Landauer's principle linking information and energy. Applying a set of topological and thermodynamic axioms to an enumeration of candidate defect geometries, the paper isolates five stable states whose computed "verification costs" — 1, 207, 273, 1836, and 1839 — correspond to the mass ratios of the electron, muon, pion, proton, and neutron, with no fitted parameters. The paper also derives an exact spatial isotropy condition for the lattice and discusses the emergence of Lorentz invariance in the continuum limit.

The second, Matter as Incomplete Crystallization, presents two principal results. The first is a computational simulation of the vacuum crystallizing in the early universe: starting from a single entangled bond and two local growth operators — "stitch" and "lift" — the model self-assembles through a phase transition from a frustrated four-fold-coordinated foam into the ordered, twelve-fold-coordinated FCC lattice. The simulation exhibits a sharp geometric phase transition at a critical length scale, finite-size scaling toward full FCC saturation in the large-system limit, and an isotropic wave dispersion consistent with the emergence of relativity, all from a small set of geometrically determined rules with no fitted parameters.

The second result builds matter on top of that vacuum: baryonic matter corresponds to a single extra node trapped in a tetrahedral void when the crystallization is incomplete. From this premise the paper derives the fractional electric charges of quarks (−1/3 and +2/3), the three color charges of the strong interaction, linear color confinement, and the proton-to-electron mass ratio of 1836 — each from the unadjusted geometry of the lattice.

Both papers connect to active research themes in the physics community, including emergent spacetime, holographic quantum error-correcting codes, and discrete approaches to quantum gravity, and state explicit predictions intended to be testable.

"The FCC lattice has a remarkable structure, and we wanted to see how far its geometry could be pushed — first as a practical quantum error-correcting code, and then as a lens on deeper questions in physics," said Raghu Kulkarni, CEO of IDrive Inc., who leads the SSMTheory Group. "Contributing to the peer-reviewed physics literature is a genuine milestone for our research effort. We've tried to be precise about what each result establishes, and we're sharing this work to invite scrutiny and collaboration from the wider research community."

About the research

All three papers share a common foundation in the geometry of the Face-Centered Cubic lattice and are accompanied by interactive 3D visualizations and, where applicable, open verification code. The two Physics Open articles are open access under a Creative Commons license and are freely available via ScienceDirect.

Publications

• R. Kulkarni, "A 67%-Rate CSS Code on the FCC Lattice: [[192, 130, 3]] from Weight-12 Stabilizers," preprint, arXiv:2603.20294 (2026).
• R. Kulkarni, "The Mass-Energy-Information Equivalence: A bottom-up identification of the particle spectrum via FCC lattice error correction," Physics Open 27, 100414 (2026). DOI: 10.1016/j.physo.2026.100414
• R. Kulkarni, "Matter as incomplete crystallization: Quark charges, color confinement, and the proton mass from a single extra node in the vacuum lattice," Physics Open 27, 100423 (2026). DOI: 10.1016/j.physo.2026.100423

More details on the SSMTheory are available at https://idrive.com/ssmtheory.

About IDrive Inc.

IDrive Inc., headquartered in Calabasas, California, is a technology company best known for its cloud backup and data-protection services. The SSMTheory Group is IDrive's research initiative exploring foundational questions in quantum information science and theoretical physics.

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