We study restrictions on locality-preserving unitary logical gates for topological quantum codes in two spatial dimensions. A locality-preserving operation is one which maps local operators to local operators — for example, a constant-depth quantum circuit of geometrically local gates, or evolution for a constant time governed by a geometrically local bounded-strength Hamiltonian. Locality-preserving logical gates of topological codes are intrinsically fault tolerant because spatially localized errors remain localized, and hence sufficiently dilute errors remain correctable. By invoking general properties of two-dimensional topological field theories, we find that the locality-preserving logical gates are severely limited for codes which admit non-abelian anyons, in particular, there are no locality-preserving logical gates on the torus or the sphere with M punctures if the braiding of anyons is computationally universal. Furthermore, for Ising anyons on the M-punctured sphere, locality-preserving gates must be elements of the logical Pauli group. We derive these results by relating logical gates of a topological code to automorphisms of the Verlinde algebra of the corresponding anyon model, and by requiring the logical gates to be compatible with basis changes in the logical Hilbert space arising from local F-moves and the mapping class group.
Locality-preserving logical operators in topological codes are naturally fault tolerant, since they preserve the correctability of local errors. Using a correspondence between such operators and gapped domain walls, we describe a procedure for finding all locality-preserving logical operators admitted by a large and important class of topological stabilizer codes. In particular, we focus on those equivalent to a stack of a finite number of surface codes of any spatial dimension, where our procedure fully specifies the group of locality-preserving logical operators. We also present examples of how our procedure applies to codes with different boundary conditions, including color codes and toric codes, as well as more general codes such as Abelian quantum double models and codes with fermionic excitations in more than two dimensions.
A fundamental question in the theory of quantum computation is to understand the ultimate space-time resource costs for performing a universal set of logical quantum gates to arbitrary precision. Here we demonstrate that non-Abelian anyons in Turaev-Viro quantum error correcting codes can be moved over a distance of order of the code distance, and thus braided, by a constant depth local unitary quantum circuit followed by a permutation of qubits. Our gates are protected in the sense that the lengths of error strings do not grow by more than a constant factor. When applied to the Fibonacci code, our results demonstrate that a universal logical gate set can be implemented on encoded qubits through a constant depth unitary quantum circuit, and without increasing the asymptotic scaling of the space overhead. These results also apply directly to braiding of topological defects in surface codes. Our results reformulate the notion of braiding in general as an effectively instantaneous process, rather than as an adiabatic, slow process.
A fundamental question in the theory of quantum computation is to understand the ultimate space-time resource costs for performing a universal set of logical quantum gates to arbitrary precision. Here we demonstrate that non-Abelian anyons in Turaev-Viro quantum error correcting codes can be moved over a distance of order the code distance, and thus braided, by a constant depth local unitary quantum circuit followed by a permutation of qubits. Our gates are protected in the sense that the length of error strings do not grow by more than a constant factor. When applied to the Fibonacci surface code, our results demonstrate that a universal logical gate set can be implemented on encoded qubits through a constant depth unitary quantum circuit, and without increasing the asymptotic scaling of the space overhead. Our result reformulates the notion of anyon braiding as an effectively instantaneous process, rather than as an adiabatic, slow process.
Given a quantum error correcting code, an important task is to find encoded operations that can be implemented efficiently and fault tolerantly. In this Letter we focus on topological stabilizer codes and encoded unitary gates that can be implemented by a constant-depth quantum circuit. Such gates have a certain degree of protection since propagation of errors in a constant-depth circuit is limited by a constant size light cone. For the 2D geometry we show that constant-depth circuits can only implement a finite group of encoded gates known as the Clifford group. This implies that topological protection must be "turned off" for at least some steps in the computation in order to achieve universality. For the 3D geometry we show that an encoded gate U is implementable by a constant-depth circuit only if UPU(†) is in the Clifford group for any Pauli operator P. This class of gates includes some non-Clifford gates such as the π/8 rotation. Our classification applies to any stabilizer code with geometrically local stabilizers and sufficiently large code distance.
We present an entirely 2D constant-depth realization of topologically protected phase gates at any level of the Clifford hierarchy, and beyond, using non-Abelian surface codes. Our construction encodes a logical qubit in the quantum double
D(G) of a non-Abelian group
G on a triangular spatial patch. The logical gate is implemented by a constant-depth circuit constructed from stacking on the spatial region a symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phase specified by a group 2-cocycle and boundary counter-terms. The Bravyi-König theorem limits the unitary gates implementable by constant-depth quantum circuits on Pauli stabilizer codes in
D dimensions to the
D-th level of the Clifford hierarchy. We bypass this limitation, by constructing constant-depth unitary gates at arbitrary levels of the Clifford hierarchy purely in 2D, without sacrificing locality or fault tolerance, at the cost of using the quantum double of a non-Abelian group
G. Specifically, for
G=D4N, the dihedral group of order
8N, we realize the phase gate
T1/N=diag(1,eiπ/(4N)) in the logical
Z basis. In this context, we propose a non-abelian stabilizer group formalism, which we work out for dihedral groups. For
8N=2n, the logical gate lies at the
n-th level of the Clifford hierarchy and, importantly, has a qubit-only realization: we show that it can be constructed in terms of Clifford-hierarchy stabilizers for a code with
n physical qubits on each edge of the lattice. We also discuss code-switching to the double surface-code
D(Z2×Z2), to complete a universal gate-set in this setup.
Topological quantum computation encodes quantum information in the internal fusion space of non-Abelian anyonic quasiparticles, whose braiding implements logical gates. This goes beyond Abelian topological order (TO) such as the toric code, as its anyons lack internal structure. However, the simplest non-Abelian generalizations of the toric code do not support universality via braiding alone. Here we demonstrate that such minimally non-Abelian TOs can be made universal by treating anyon fusion as a computational primitive. We prepare a 54-qubit TO wavefunction associated with the smallest non-Abelian group,
S3, on Quantinuum's H2 quantum processor. This phase of matter exhibits cyclic anyon fusion rules, known to underpin universality, which we evidence by trapping a single non-Abelian anyon on the torus. We encode logical qutrits in the nonlocal fusion space of non-Abelian fluxes and, by combining an entangling braiding operation with anyon charge measurements, realize a universal topological gate set and read-out, which we further demonstrate by topologically preparing a magic state. This work establishes
S3 TO as simple enough to be prepared efficiently, yet rich enough to enable universal topological quantum computation.