Surface and color codes are two forms of topological quantum error correction in two spatial dimensions with complementary properties. Surface codes have lower-depth error detection circuits and well-developed decoders to interpret and correct errors, while color codes have transversal Clifford gates and better code efficiency in the number of physical qubits needed to achieve a given code distance. A formal equivalence exists between color codes and folded surface codes, but it does not guarantee the transferability of any of these favorable properties. However, the equivalence does imply the existence of constant-depth circuit implementations of logical Clifford gates on folded surface codes. We achieve and improve this result by constructing two families of folded surface codes with transversal Clifford gates. This construction is presented generally for qudits of any dimension. The specific application of these codes to universal quantum computation based on qubit fusion is also discussed.
Surface and color codes are two forms of topological quantum error correction in two spatial dimensions with complementary properties. Surface codes have lower-depth error detection circuits and well-developed decoders to interpret and correct errors, while color codes have transversal Clifford gates and better code efficiency in the number of physical qubits needed to achieve a given code distance. A formal equivalence exists between color codes and folded surface codes, but it does not guarantee the transferability of any of these favorable properties. However, the equivalence does imply the existence of constant-depth circuit implementations of logical Clifford gates on folded surface codes. We achieve and improve this result by constructing two families of folded surface codes with transversal Clifford gates. This construction is presented generally for qudits of any dimension. The specific application of these codes to universal quantum computation based on qubit fusion is also discussed.
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.
We study the structure and transversal logical capabilities of stabilizer quantum error correcting codes. Among our results, we identify universal lower bounds on circuit depth to generate a full logical Clifford algebra, and develop novel constructions of logical transversal gates including a new depth-one transversal phase S gate in the rotated surface code and a depth-one intra-block CZ gate in the 2D-toric code that generalizes to all odd distances and all lengths L≥3, respectively. Finally, we construct a high-rate non-LDPC CSS code family with parameters [[n,n,Θ(nβ)]] where β≈0.2823 in one demonstrated case, that provably possesses a constant-depth complete 2-local transversal logical Clifford basis instruction set architecture (ISA) composed of all individually targeted S, SHS=X, and CZ gates. This ISA is depth-one for certain subfamilies that we design and generally constant-depth under certain conditions. The code family is built from a small code with parameters [[n0,2,d0]], and is tunable in the standard way: it tiles out to form utility-scale logical qubit counts, and it scales up through concatenation to achieve higher distances and error suppression. We show that this construction preserves the depth-one complete transversal logical Clifford basis ISA when composed with these commuting construction actions, inheriting structure from the core codes so that at scale the complete logical Clifford basis ISA remains depth-one up to depth-two addressable operations between tiled cores. We call these Quantum Logic Codes.
A technique for realizing a universal set of fault-tolerant quantum operations is the code switching method, which leverages two quantum codes with complementary sets of transversal gates. To date, the application of this technique has been largely limited to families of color codes supporting a logical T gate. No analogous code switching protocols exist for many other prominent families, such as rotated surface codes, or for finer Z-rotation gates. In this work, we first utilize the doubling technique as a unified framework to construct a class of quantum color codes encoding a single logical qubit with an arbitrarily large minimum distance, enabling the transversal realization of arbitrary small logical Z-rotation gates. We investigate the structural properties of this code family, demonstrating that they improve upon the parameters of state-of-the-art triorthogonal codes, achieve lower qubit overhead compared to certain known color codes, and admit single-shot decoding of Z-syndromes via meta-checks. Furthermore, we show that this framework extends beyond color codes; specifically, it enables the generation of r-orthogonal quantum codes, r≥2, that inherit the local geometry of rotated surface codes. We then provide an overhead optimization protocol alongside several candidate codes tailored for realizing logical Z-rotation gates within rotated surface codes. Finally, we extend the fault-tolerant code switching protocol based on transversal CNOT gates to incorporate fault-tolerant realization of Z-rotation gates at any level of the Clifford hierarchy for geometries compatible with rotated surface codes. We present the first demonstration of fault-tolerant magic state preparation by means of code switching within a distance-three rotated surface code using a total footprint of only 45 physical qubits, and evaluate its performance through a simulation.
Quantum computers are far more error-prone than their classical counterparts. Therefore, to build a quantum computer capable of running large-scale quantum algorithms, we must use the techniques of quantum error correction to ensure that the computer produces the correct output even when its components are unreliable. However, the resource requirements of building such a fault-tolerant quantum computer are currently prohibitive. Here, we examine the utility of using three-dimensional (3D) surface codes in a fault-tolerant quantum computer. This family of topological error-correcting codes is a generalization of the well-known 2D surface code to three spatial dimensions. We show that certain 3D surface codes have a transversal logical non-Clifford gate. In a quantum computing architecture, a non-Clifford gate is required to achieve computational universality. Transversal gates do not entangle qubits in different codes, so they are naturally fault tolerant because they do not spread errors. Next, we consider the problem of decoding 3D surface codes. In a quantum error-correcting code, we cannot observe the qubits directly, so we measure parity-check operators to gain information about the state of the code. Decoding is the problem of estimating what error has occurred given a list of unsatisfied parity checks. We observe that 3D surface codes offer asymmetric protection against bit-flip and phase-flip errors, but in both cases, we find that a threshold error rate exists below which we can suppress logical errors by increasing the size of the code. We use our results about logical gates and decoding to propose two fault-tolerant quantum computing architectures that utilize 3D surface codes. Finally, we compare the resource requirements of our architectures with the requirements of leading quantum computing architectures based on topological codes. We find that one of our architectures may be competitive with the leading architectures, depending on the properties of the physical systems used to build the qubits.
We introduce group surface codes, which are a natural generalization of the Z2 surface code, and equivalent to quantum double models of finite groups with specific boundary conditions. We show that group surface codes can be leveraged to perform non-Clifford gates in Z2 surface codes, thus enabling universal computation along with established means of performing logical Clifford gates. Moreover, for suitably chosen groups, we demonstrate that arbitrary reversible classical gates can be implemented transversally in the group surface code. We present the logical operations in terms of a set of elementary logical operations, which include transversal logical gates, a means of transferring encoded information into and out of group surface codes, and preparation and readout. By composing these elementary operations, we implement a wide variety of logical gates and provide a unified perspective on recent constructions in the literature for sliding group surface codes and preparing magic states. We furthermore use tensor networks inspired by ZX-calculus to construct spacetime implementations of the elementary operations. This spacetime perspective also allows us to establish explicit correspondences with topological gauge theories. Our work extends recent efforts in performing universal quantum computation in topological orders without the braiding of anyons, and shows how certain group surface codes allow us to bypass the restrictions set by the Bravyi-König theorem, which limits the computational power of topological Pauli stabilizer models.
Low-space-overhead fault-tolerant quantum computation requires not only high-rate quantum error-correcting codes but also space-efficient implementations of logical operations. Transversal and fold-transversal gates are promising since they limit error propagation and require no additional qubits. However, the logical operations they enable are typically restricted, and a central challenge is to construct codes that combine a complete set of logical Clifford gates with favorable code parameters. In this work, we introduce a family of quantum codes with an asymptotically constant encoding rate and sublogarithmically growing stabilizer weight, while supporting the entire logical Clifford group using only transversal and fold-transversal gates. Our construction is based on classical codes whose code spaces are absolutely irreducible Steinberg modules of their Tanner-graph automorphism groups. Taking hypergraph products of these classical codes yields quantum codes for which all logical Clifford operations can be synthesized from a fixed set of transversal and fold-transversal gates. Moreover, the slow growth of the stabilizer weight enables a high error-correcting performance in small instances. These results provide a path toward fault-tolerant quantum computation with low space overhead using transversal and fold-transversal gates.