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arXiv:1503.08800 · Physical Review A

Qudit color codes and gauge color codes in all spatial dimensions

Fern H. E. Watson, Earl T. Campbell, Hussain Anwar, Dan E. Browne

Published Aug 7, 2015• 44 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Two-level quantum systems, qubits, are not the only basis for quantum computation. Advantages exist in using qudits, $d$-level quantum systems, as the basic carrier of quantum information. We show that color codes, a class of topological quantum codes with remarkable transversality properties, can be generalized to the qudit paradigm. In recent developments it was found that in three spatial dimensions a qubit color code can support a transversal non-Clifford gate and that in higher spatial dimensions additional non-Clifford gates can be found, saturating Bravyi and K\"onig's bound [S. Bravyi and R. K\"onig, Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 170502 (2013)]. Furthermore, by using gauge fixing techniques, an effective set of Clifford gates can be achieved, removing the need for state distillation. We show that the qudit color code can support the qudit analogs of these gates and also show that in higher spatial dimensions a color code can support a phase gate from higher levels of the Clifford hierarchy that can be proven to saturate Bravyi and K\"onig's bound in all but a finite number of special cases. The methodology used is a generalization of Bravyi and Haah's method of triorthogonal matrices [S. Bravyi and J. Haah, Phys. Rev. A 86, 052329 (2012)], which may be of independent interest. For completeness, we show explicitly that the qudit color codes generalize to gauge color codes and share many of the favorable properties of their qubit counterparts.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.92.022312

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Two-level quantum systems, qubits, are not the only basis for quantum computation. Advantages exist in using qudits, ddd-level quantum systems, as the basic carrier of quantum information. We show that color codes, a class of topological quantum codes with remarkable transversality properties, can be generalized to the qudit paradigm. In recent developments it was found that in three spatial dimensions a qubit color code can support a transversal non-Clifford gate and that in higher spatial dimensions additional non-Clifford gates can be found, saturating Bravyi and K"onig's bound [S. Bravyi and R. K"onig, Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 170502 (2013)]. Furthermore, by using gauge fixing techniques, an effective set of Clifford gates can be achieved, removing the need for state distillation. We show that the qudit color code can support the qudit analogs of these gates and also show that in higher spatial dimensions a color code can support a phase gate from higher levels of the Clifford hierarchy that can be proven to saturate Bravyi and K"onig's bound in all but a finite number of special cases. The methodology used is a generalization of Bravyi and Haah's method of triorthogonal matrices [S. Bravyi and J. Haah, Phys. Rev. A 86, 052329 (2012)], which may be of independent interest. For completeness, we show explicitly that the qudit color codes generalize to gauge color codes and share many of the favorable properties of their qubit counterparts.
In fault-tolerant quantum computation [1], quantum information is protected from noise by encoding it in somewhat non-local degrees of freedom, thus distributing it among many smaller subsystems, typically qubits. This makes sense under the physically relevant assumption that interactions with the environment have a local nature. The implementation of gates, consequently, must be also as local as possible to preserve the structure of noise. This is naturally achieved with transversal gates, i.e. unitary operators that transform encoded states by acting separately on suitable subsystems, in the simplest case independently on each qubit. Unfortunately, no code admits a universal transversal set of gates [2]. Topological quantum error correcting codes [3] introduce a richer notion of locality by considering the spatial location of the physical qubits, which are assumed to be arranged on a lattice. They come in families parametrized with a lattice size, for a fixed spatial dimension. Their defining features are (i) that the measurements needed to recover information about errors only involve a few neighbouring qubits and (ii) that no encoded information can be recovered without access to a number of physical qubits comparable to the system size. Rather than sticking to the above definition of transversality, for topological codes it is natural to consider instead quantum circuits of fixed depth with geometrically local gates [4, 5]. Remarkably, it has been recently shown that spatial dimension imposes constraints on the transversal gates that are allowed [5]. In particular, this is true in the case of topological stabilizer codes, where it has been found that transversal gates on D-dimensional codes have to belong to certain sets PD. A first main result of this work [6] is that codes that saturate these bounds can be constructed for every D, in the sense that they admit at least a transversal gate in PD (not belonging to PD−1). In particular, the result applies to color codes [7, 8, 9, 10], where the single-qubit gate RD := ( 1 0 0 e2πi/2 D ) is transversal (in the more strict non-topological sense).
We present a family of quantum error-correcting codes that support a universal set of transversal logic gates using only local operations on a two-dimensional array of physical qubits. The construction is a subsystem version of color codes where gauge fixing through local measurements dynamically determines which gates are transversal. Although the operations are local, the underlying code is not topological in structure, which is how the construction circumvents no-go constraints imposed by the Bravyi-K\"onig and Pastawski-Yoshida theorems. We provide strong evidence that the encoding has no error threshold in the conventional sense, though it is still possible to have logical gates with error probability much lower than that of physical gates.
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In this thesis we present three main contributions to the field of topological quantum error correcting codes. We focus on some of the properties of such codes required for fault-tolerant quantum computation. Prior work has concentrated on determining error rate thresholds of particular models, but increasingly other parameters are gaining prominence. One of these is the overhead -- the quantity of a named resource required to achieve a desired level of performance from the code. We characterise the qubit overhead of the toric code in a fault-tolerant setting. These results provide a general framework for determining the overhead for other code constructions with more complicated noise models. Next we introduce a decoding algorithm, applicable to topological codes in a qudit architecture, specifically those where fault-tolerance is achieved through repeated syndrome measurements. It is computationally light and capable of decoding qudits of arbitrarily high dimension with negligible increase in its run time. The threshold of the decoder is limited by the percolation of the syndromes. Using local matching techniques we are able to overcome this limitation, increasing the threshold by almost a factor of two for high qudit dimensions. Finally, we turn our attention to a second family of topological quantum codes: the colour codes. In three and higher spatial dimensions such codes can support transversal non-Clifford gates. We show, using a technique that we call a star-bipartition of the vertices of the lattice, that any existing qubit colour code lattice can be used to define a qudit colour code. By generalising the notion of triorthogonal matrices we derive analogous transversality properties in the qudit codes.