We study a frustrated seam produced by literal reflection gluing of Wen's plaquette model on a closed lattice Klein bottle. The seam operators anticommute along two cycles for even circumference and one cycle of twice the length for odd circumference. Their algebra reduces to free Majorana rings, while the commuting bulk stabilizers constrain the allowed ring sectors. This bulk locking yields exact ground energies, excitation gaps and degeneracies, checked by phase-aware Pauli traces and finite-size diagonalization, including two 24-qubit energy predictions. The seam degeneracy is not topological: the single-site seam fields tested split it at second order. We contrast this obstructed gluing with consistent toric-code realizations. An edge register preserves the anyon labels; a Hadamard-dressed site register has colour-dependent seam transport, with ground-state degeneracy 2 or 4 for even circumference and a sign-frustrated exception at odd circumference. For the enumerated lattice isometries and sizes, we compute logical gates and distances, distinguishing abstract qubit relabelling from local hardware depth. Finally, on three 16- and 24-qubit lattices, chiral matter selects a holonomy doublet whose electric-field splitting follows two competing tunnelling routes. These matter results remain finite-size statements. The main result is the exact obstructed-seam solution with bulk sector locking; the register, gate and matter calculations delimit its relation to topological codes.
We study a frustrated seam produced by literal reflection gluing of Wen's plaquette model on a closed lattice Klein bottle. The seam operators anticommute along two cycles for even circumference and one cycle of twice the length for odd circumference. Their algebra reduces to free Majorana rings, while the commuting bulk stabilizers constrain the allowed ring sectors. This bulk locking yields exact ground energies, excitation gaps and degeneracies, checked by phase-aware Pauli traces and finite-size diagonalization, including two 24-qubit energy predictions. The seam degeneracy is not topological: the single-site seam fields tested split it at second order. We contrast this obstructed gluing with consistent toric-code realizations. An edge register preserves the anyon labels; a Hadamard-dressed site register has colour-dependent seam transport, with ground-state degeneracy 2 or 4 for even circumference and a sign-frustrated exception at odd circumference. For the enumerated lattice isometries and sizes, we compute logical gates and distances, distinguishing abstract qubit relabelling from local hardware depth. Finally, on three 16- and 24-qubit lattices, chiral matter selects a holonomy doublet whose electric-field splitting follows two competing tunnelling routes. These matter results remain finite-size statements. The main result is the exact obstructed-seam solution with bulk sector locking; the register, gate and matter calculations delimit its relation to topological codes.
We construct an exactly solvable extension of the spin-1/2 Kitaev honeycomb model in which conserved Z2 fluxes determine not only the signs but also the connectivity of nearest-neighbor Majorana hopping. At a tuned loop point, hopping survives only across opposite-flux plaquettes, so every vertex has active degree zero or two and the matter Hamiltonian fragments in each flux sector into independent Majorana rings and isolated zero modes. Exact ring spectra and bond counting then bound the matter energy over all local flux configurations and all four Wilson-loop sectors, and split it exactly into a frustrated triangular-lattice Ising term, whose extensively degenerate ground states are the fully packed loop coverings, and a non-negative Majorana residual. On admissible commensurate tori, the residual selects precisely the three translation-related 2/3-vison crystals, which saturate the bound, and an exact fermion-parity identity shows that for antiferromagnetic coupling their vacua also survive projection, making them rigorous ground states of the spin model. Within a single crystal, a depth-one local unitary then maps the ground space onto that of a sheared square-lattice toric code, giving fourfold topological degeneracy. The model thus realizes exact nonperturbative gauge-matter feedback: the flux fixes where the Majorana fermions may move, and their zero-point energy selects in return a topologically ordered vison crystal with spontaneously broken translation symmetry.
We demonstrate that the logical operator algebra of the Klein bottle stabilizer code is non-orientable, confirming that the code encodes non-orientable topology at the level of the logical Hilbert space, not merely at the level of the stabilizer construction. Using dynamic circuits with mid-circuit reset on IBM Fez (Heron r2, 156 qubits), we apply the b-cycle logical gate X_L2 to each of the four logical sectors and measure the resulting syndrome in a second round. The Klein code produces different sector transitions than the toric code under the identical gate, confirming that X_L2 anticommutes with Z_L1 in Klein but commutes in the toric code. No orientable stabilizer code can produce this result. Key results: Sector Job ID Klein R2 Z Toric R2 Z |10>_L (holonomy) d73rqh5koquc73e22ni0 10000010 at 11.79% 90σ 10001011 at 22.96% 272σ |00>_L d73u5ttkoquc73e251eg 10000001 at 13.9% 99σ 10001000 at 21.9% 312σ |10>_L d73u5ttkoquc73e251eg 10000010 at 12.7% 105σ 10001011 at 18.0% 230σ |01>_L d73u5ttkoquc73e251eg 10001000 at 11.9% 45σ 10000001 at 16.0% 70σ |11>_L d73u854vllmc73anvom0 dominant confirmed — dominant confirmed — All dominant patterns match theoretical predictions exactly. Cross-contamination below 1.2% in all cases. The transition table: Klein: |00> ↔ |11>, |10> ↔ |01> (X_L2 flips BOTH Z_L1 and Z_L2) Toric: |00> ↔ |01>, |10> ↔ |11> (X_L2 flips ONLY Z_L2) The two holonomy maps act on different sector pairs, the non-orientable twist permutes the logical sector labels relative to the orientable case. This is the third in a series of three papers establishing complete experimental characterisation of the Klein bottle stabilizer code: Paper 1 (doi:10.5281/zenodo.19284050): Code exists on hardware, GSD=4, kill test Z=691σ Paper 2 (doi:10.5281/zenodo.19286677): Boundary parameter δ is tunable, Z=316–606σ Paper 3 (this paper): Logical algebra is non-orientable, Z=45–312σ Live demo: https://kleincode.pythonanywhere.com Paper 1: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19284050 Paper 2: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19286677 All hardware experiments performed on IBM Fez (Heron r2, 156 qubits) via IBM Quantum Runtime. Code: MIT license. Paper: CC BY 4.0.
Stabilizer codes provide exact lattice realizations of bosonic topological orders. In contrast, systematic stabilizer descriptions of intrinsically fermionic topological phases remain much less developed. In this work, we introduce Majorana-Pauli stabilizer codes, a class of exactly solvable fermionic lattice models whose stabilizers are built from both generalized Pauli operators and Majorana operators. As a main example, we construct an exactly solvable stabilizer realization of the fermionic toric code: an intrinsically fermionic Z2 topological order in (2+1) dimensions, using Z8 Pauli operators coupled to Majorana modes. Within this stabilizer framework, the anyons, string operators, fusion rules, and braiding statistics all follow naturally from the stabilizer algebra. More broadly, we show that the fermionic toric code belongs to a duality web generated by anyon condensation and by gauging or ungauging bosonic or fermionic symmetries. This web connects bosonic topological orders, symmetry-enriched topological (SET) phases, and both bosonic and fermionic symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phases, all within a common stabilizer description. We extend this construction to all Abelian fermionic topological orders with gapped boundaries and to fermionic SPT phases whose fully gauged theories are Abelian. Going beyond Majorana operators, we introduce fermionic versions of the clock and shift operators and use them to construct an exact bosonization map for ZDF symmetries for D even. Using this, we realize a stabilizer model for a nontrivial Z8F fermionic SPT phase with no free-fermion analog. Altogether, these results extend the stabilizer-code paradigm to a broad class of intrinsically fermionic phases bridging fermionic quantum many-body physics to quantum error correction.
Dimer models have long been a fruitful playground for understanding topological physics. Here, we introduce a class, termed Majorana-dimer models, wherein bosonic dimers are decorated with pairs of Majorana modes. We find that the simplest examples of such systems realize an intriguing, intrinsically fermionic phase of matter that can be viewed as the product of a chiral Ising theory, which hosts deconfined non-Abelian quasiparticles, and a topological ${p}_{x}\ensuremath{-}i{p}_{y}$ superconductor. While the bulk anyons are described by a single copy of the Ising theory, the edge remains fully gapped. Consequently, this phase can arise in exactly solvable, frustration-free models. We describe two parent Hamiltonians: one generalizes the well-known dimer model on the triangular lattice, while the other is most naturally understood as a model of decorated fluctuating loops on a honeycomb lattice. Using modular transformations, we show that the ground-state manifold of the latter model unambiguously exhibits all properties of the $\text{Ising}\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}({p}_{x}\ensuremath{-}i{p}_{y})$ theory. We also discuss generalizations with more than one Majorana mode per site, which realize phases related to Kitaev's 16-fold way in a similar fashion.
Local frustration-free constraints can transport amplitudes consistently on every bond yet fail around a ring. We solve this obstruction for an interacting periodic spin-one Motzkin Hamiltonian with arbitrary nonzero complex ordered-bond parameters. The complete finite-size ground-space degeneracy and surviving-sector pattern depend only on the complex product of the bond parameters: for every ring size N ≥ 2, the dimension is 2N + 1 at trivial holonomy and exactly 3 otherwise. On the unit circle, the principal total boundary flux removes every nonextreme charged exact ground state and shifts the two charge-conjugate one-flat bands oppositely. Because those bands are invariant sectors of the full Hamiltonian, a fixed nonzero total flux gives a rigorous many-body gap upper bound of order N⁻². Moreover, every lifted charged sector contains a positive level at or below the squared principal flux divided by 4N, yielding at least 2N − 2 soft eigenvalues, counting multiplicity. Boundary flux therefore collapses the growing exact ground manifold without opening a thermodynamic gap. No gap lower bound, bulk transition, topology, or quantized transport is claimed. This v1 record contains the eight-page combined preprint and its minimal four-file LaTeX source archive. This is a preprint and has not undergone journal peer review.
Kitaev's toric code is an exactly solvable model with Z2-topological order, which has potential applications in quantum computation and error correction. However, a direct experimental realization remains an open challenge. Here, we propose a building block for Z2 lattice gauge theories coupled to dynamical matter and demonstrate how it allows for an implementation of the toric-code ground state and its topological excitations. This is achieved by introducing separate matter excitations on individual plaquettes, whose motion induce the required plaquette terms. The proposed building block is realized in the second-order coupling regime and is well suited for implementations with superconducting qubits. Furthermore, we propose a pathway to prepare topologically nontrivial initial states during which a large gap on the order of the underlying coupling strength is present. This is verified by both analytical arguments and numerical studies. Moreover, we outline experimental signatures of the ground-state wave function and introduce a minimal braiding protocol. Detecting a $\ensuremath{\pi}$-phase shift between Ramsey fringes in this protocol reveals the anyonic excitations of the toric-code Hamiltonian in a system with only three triangular plaquettes. Our work paves the way for realizing non-Abelian anyons in analog quantum simulators.