We introduce a family of scalable planar fault-tolerant circuits that implement logical non-Clifford operations on a 2D color code, such as a logical T gate or a logical non-Pauli measurement that prepares a magic | T ⟩ state. The circuits are relatively simple, consisting only of physical T gates, C X gates, and few-qubit measurements. They can be implemented with an array of qubits on a 2D chip with nearest-neighbor couplings and no wire crossings. The construction is based on a spacetime path integral representation of a non-Abelian 2+1D topological phase, which is related to the 3D color code. We turn the path integral into a circuit by expressing it as a spacetime Z X tensor network and then traversing it in some chosen time direction. We describe in detail how fault tolerance is achieved using a “just-in-time” decoding strategy, for which we repurpose and extend state-of-the-art color-code matching decoders.
We introduce a family of scalable planar fault-tolerant circuits that implement logical non-Clifford operations on a 2D color code, such as a logical T gate or a logical non-Pauli measurement that prepares a magic | T ⟩ state. The circuits are relatively simple, consisting only of physical T gates, C X gates, and few-qubit measurements. They can be implemented with an array of qubits on a 2D chip with nearest-neighbor couplings and no wire crossings. The construction is based on a spacetime path integral representation of a non-Abelian 2+1D topological phase, which is related to the 3D color code. We turn the path integral into a circuit by expressing it as a spacetime Z X tensor network and then traversing it in some chosen time direction. We describe in detail how fault tolerance is achieved using a “just-in-time” decoding strategy, for which we repurpose and extend state-of-the-art color-code matching decoders.
Topological codes have many desirable properties that allow fault-tolerant quantum computation with relatively low overhead. A core challenge for these codes, however, is to achieve a low-overhead universal gate set with limited connectivity. In this work, we explore a non-Pauli stabilizer code that can be used to complete a universal gate set on topological toric and surface codes in strictly two dimensions. Fault-tolerant syndrome extraction for the non-Pauli code requires mid-circuit X corrections, a key difference to conventional Pauli codes. We construct and benchmark a just-in-time (JIT) matching decoder to reliably decide these corrections. Under a phenomenological error model with equally likely physical and measurement errors, we find a high threshold of ≈2.5%, close to the ≈2.9% of a decoder with access to the full syndrome history. We also perform a finite-size scaling analysis to estimate how the logical error rate scales below threshold and verify an exponential suppression in both physical error rate and in the system size. A second global decoding step for Z errors is required and the non-Clifford gates in the circuit reduce the threshold from ≈2.9% to ≈1.8% with a naive decoder. We show how Z decoding can be improved using knowledge of the X corrections, pushing the threshold to ≈2.2%. Our results suggest non-Clifford logic in 2D codes could perform comparably to 2D quantum memory. Our formalism for efficient benchmarking and decoding directly generalizes to a broader family of CSS codes whose X stabilizers are twisted by diagonal Clifford operators, and spacetime versions thereof, defined by CSS-like circuits enriched by CCZ, CS, and T gates.
We show how to perform scalable fault-tolerant non-Clifford gates in two dimensions by introducing domain walls between the surface code and a non-Abelian topological code whose code space is stabilized by Clifford operators. We formulate a path-integral framework which provides both a macroscopic picture for different logical gates as well as a way to derive the associated microscopic circuits. We also show an equivalence between our approach and prior proposals where a 2D array of qubits reproduces the action of a transversal gate in a 3D stabilizer code over time, thus establishing a connection between 3D codes and 2D non-Abelian topological phases. We prove a threshold theorem for our protocols under local stochastic circuit noise using a just-in-time decoder to correct the non-Abelian code.
We introduce a class of three-dimensional color codes, which we call stacked codes, together with a fault-tolerant transformation that will map logical qubits encoded in two-dimensional (2D) color codes into stacked codes and back. The stacked code allows for the transversal implementation of a non-Clifford $\ensuremath{\pi}/8$ logical gate, which when combined with the logical Clifford gates that are transversal in the 2D color code give a gate set that is both fault-tolerant and universal without requiring nonstabilizer magic states. We then show that the layers forming the stacked code can be unfolded and arranged in a 2D layout. As only Clifford gates can be implemented transversally for 2D topological stabilizer codes, a nonlocal operation must be incorporated in order to allow for this transversal application of a non-Clifford gate. Our code achieves this operation through the transformation from a 2D color code to the unfolded stacked code induced by measuring only geometrically local stabilizers and gauge operators within the bulk of 2D color codes together with a nonlocal operator that has support on a one-dimensional boundary between such 2D codes. We believe that this proposed method to implement the nonlocal operation is a realistic one for 2D stabilizer layouts and would be beneficial in avoiding the large overheads caused by magic state distillation.
Practical large-scale quantum computation requires both efficient error correction and robust implementation of logical operations. Three-dimensional (3D) color codes are a promising candidate for fault-tolerant quantum computation due to their transversal non-Clifford gates, but efficient decoding remains challenging. In this work, we extend previous decoders for two-dimensional color codes [1], which are based on the restriction of the decoding problem to a subset of the qubit lattice, to three dimensions. Including boundaries of 3D color codes, we demonstrate that the 3D restriction decoder achieves optimal scaling of the logical error rate and a threshold value of 1.55(6)% for code-capacity bit- and phase-flip noise, which is almost a factor of two higher than previously reported for this family of codes [2, 3]. We furthermore present qCodePlot3D, a Python package for visualizing 2D and 3D color codes, error configurations, and decoding paths, which supports the development and analysis of such decoders. These advancements contribute to making 3D color codes a more practical option for exploring fault-tolerant quantum computation.
We propose a family of explicit geometrically local circuits on a 2-dimensional planar grid of qudits, realizing any abelian non-chiral topological phase as an actively error-corrected fault-tolerant memory. These circuits are constructed from measuring 1-form symmetries in discrete fixed-point path integrals, which we express through cellular cohomology and higher-order cup products. The specific path integral we use is the abelian Dijkgraaf-Witten state sum on a 3-dimensional cellulation, which is a spacetime representation of the twisted quantum double model. The resulting circuits are based on a syndrome extraction circuit of the (qudit) stabilizer toric code, into which we insert non-Clifford phase gates that implement the “twist''. The overhead compared to the toric code is moderate, in contrast to known constructions for twisted abelian phases. We also show that other architectures for the (qudit) toric code phase, like measurement-based topological quantum computation or Floquet codes, can be enriched with phase gates to implement twisted quantum doubles instead of their untwisted versions. As a further result, we prove fault tolerance under arbitrary local (including non-Pauli) noise for a very general class of topological circuits that we call 1-form symmetric fixed-point circuits. This notion unifies the circuits in this paper as well as the stabilizer toric code, subsystem toric code, measurement-based topological quantum computation, or the (CSS) honeycomb Floquet code. We also demonstrate how our method can be adapted to construct fault-tolerant circuits for specific non-Abelian phases. In the appendix we present an explicit combinatorial procedure to define formulas for higher cup products on arbitrary cellulations, which might be interesting in its own right to the TQFT and topological-phases community.
A fundamental problem in fault-tolerant quantum computation is the tradeoff between universality and dimensionality, exemplified by the the Bravyi-König bound for n-dimensional topological stabilizer codes. In this work, we extend topological Pauli stabilizer codes to a broad class of n-dimensional Clifford hierarchy stabilizer codes. These codes correspond to the (n+1)D Dijkgraaf-Witten gauge theories with non-Abelian topological order. We construct transversal non-Clifford gates through automorphism symmetries represented by cup products. In 2D, we obtain the first transversal non-Clifford logical gates including T and CS for Clifford stabilizer codes, using the automorphism of the twisted Z23 gauge theory (equivalent to D4 topological order). We also combine it with the just-in-time decoder to fault-tolerantly prepare the logical T magic state in O(d) rounds via code switching. In 3D, we construct a transversal logical T gate in a non-Clifford stabilizer code at the third level of the Clifford hierarchy, located on a tetrahedron corresponding to a twisted Z24 gauge theory. Our constructions surpass the Bravyi-König bound by achieving the logical gates in the (n+1)-th level of Clifford hierarchy in n spatial dimension.