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arXiv:2606.05664

Gauging the Spacetime Code

Gideon Lee

quant-phSubmitted Jun 4, 2026• Announced Jun 5, 2026• 0 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

In recent years, the spacetime code has arisen as a candidate for a unifying view of fault tolerance in space and time. On the other hand, the recent study of dynamical phases has increasingly turned its attention to fault tolerance as a notion of a dynamically stable process. In this work, I explore one pathway between the two, achieved by gauging the spacetime code. This gives rise to a lattice gauge theory that inherits the elements of fault tolerance associated with a circuit, with Gauss laws corresponding to equivalence relations between configurations of spacetime errors and Wilson loops corresponding to detectors. The obtained gauge theory finds a surprisingly wide array of applications, from quantum error correction to condensed matter physics, and even learning theory: (1) It contains in its description foliated computation, and hence gives rise to one version of a gauge theory for measurement-based quantum computation. (2) For a class of topologically ordered mixed states, it gives us a gauge-theoretic language to describe the classical memory associated with the state. (3) The gauge-invariant observables of the theory which describe detectors also coincide with the learnable degrees of freedom of circuit Pauli noise.

Comments
40 pages, 17 figures

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In recent years, the spacetime code has arisen as a candidate for a unifying view of fault tolerance in space and time. On the other hand, the recent study of dynamical phases has increasingly turned its attention to fault tolerance as a notion of a dynamically stable process. In this work, I explore one pathway between the two, achieved by gauging the spacetime code. This gives rise to a lattice gauge theory that inherits the elements of fault tolerance associated with a circuit, with Gauss laws corresponding to equivalence relations between configurations of spacetime errors and Wilson loops corresponding to detectors. The obtained gauge theory finds a surprisingly wide array of applications, from quantum error correction to condensed matter physics, and even learning theory: (1) It contains in its description foliated computation, and hence gives rise to one version of a gauge theory for measurement-based quantum computation. (2) For a class of topologically ordered mixed states, it gives us a gauge-theoretic language to describe the classical memory associated with the state. (3) The gauge-invariant observables of the theory which describe detectors also coincide with the learnable degrees of freedom of circuit Pauli noise.
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