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Physical Review A

Continuous-variable topological codes

Tomoyuki Morimae

Published Oct 10, 2013• 8 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Topological code is a stabilizer quantum error correcting code whose generators are local but logical operators are topologically nontrivial and nonlocal. It offers interesting features such as the homological deformations of string operators and anyonic excitations on it. Topological codes are also closely related to the ``topological order,'' which has been an important concept in condensed-matter physics. In this paper, we consider continuous-variable versions of topological codes, including the toric code by Kitaev [A. Y. Kitaev, Ann. Phys. 303, 2 (2003)] with a single type of stabilizer on the checkerboard lattice, and the color code by Bombin and Martin-Delgado [H. Bombin and M. A. Martin-Delgado, Phys. Rev. Lett. 97, 180501 (2006)]. We show that it is possible to consider continuous-variable analog of these topological codes.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.88.042311

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Topological code is a stabilizer quantum error correcting code whose generators are local but logical operators are topologically nontrivial and nonlocal. It offers interesting features such as the homological deformations of string operators and anyonic excitations on it. Topological codes are also closely related to the ``topological order,'' which has been an important concept in condensed-matter physics. In this paper, we consider continuous-variable versions of topological codes, including the toric code by Kitaev [A. Y. Kitaev, Ann. Phys. 303, 2 (2003)] with a single type of stabilizer on the checkerboard lattice, and the color code by Bombin and Martin-Delgado [H. Bombin and M. A. Martin-Delgado, Phys. Rev. Lett. 97, 180501 (2006)]. We show that it is possible to consider continuous-variable analog of these topological codes.
In this paper we define homological stabilizer codes which encompass codes such as Kitaev's toric code and the topological color codes. These codes are defined solely by the graphs they reside on. This feature allows us to use properties of topological graph theory to determine the graphs which are suitable as homological stabilizer codes. We then show that all toric codes are equivalent to homological stabilizer codes on 4-valent graphs. We show that the topological color codes and toric codes correspond to two distinct classes of graphs. We define the notion of label set equivalencies and show that under a small set of constraints the only homological stabilizer codes without local logical operators are equivalent to Kitaev's toric code or to the topological color codes.
We construct a family of two-dimensional topological stabilizer codes on continuous variable (CV) degrees of freedom, which generalize homological rotor codes and the toric-GKP code. Our topological codes are built using the concept of boson condensation—we start from a parent stabilizer code based on an R gauge theory and condense various bosonic excitations. This produces a large class of topological CV stabilizer codes, including ones that are characterized by the anyon theories of U ( 1 ) 2 n × U ( 1 ) − 2 m Chern-Simons theories, for arbitrary pairs of positive integers ( n , m ) . Most notably, this includes anyon theories that are nonchiral and nevertheless do not admit a gapped boundary. It is widely believed that such anyon theories cannot be realized by any stabilizer model on finite-dimensional systems. We conjecture that these CV codes go beyond codes obtained from concatenating a topological qudit code with a local encoding into CVs, and thus constitute the first example of topological codes that are intrinsic to CV systems. Moreover, we study the Hamiltonians associated with the topological CV stabilizer codes and show that, although they have a gapless spectrum, they can become gapped with the addition of a quadratic perturbation. We show that similar methods can be used to construct a gapped Hamiltonian whose anyon theory agrees with a U ( 1 ) 2 Chern-Simons theory. Our work initiates the study of scalable stabilizer codes that are intrinsic to CV systems and highlights how error-correcting codes can be used to design and analyze many-body systems of CVs that model lattice gauge theories.
We construct a family of two-dimensional topological stabilizer codes on continuous variable (CV) degrees of freedom, which generalize homological rotor codes and the toric-GKP code. Our topological codes are built using the concept of boson condensation—we start from a parent stabilizer code based on an R gauge theory and condense various bosonic excitations. This produces a large class of topological CV stabilizer codes, including ones that are characterized by the anyon theories of U⁢(1)2⁢n ×U⁢(1)−2⁢m Chern-Simons theories, for arbitrary pairs of positive integers (n,m). Most notably, this includes anyon theories that are nonchiral and nevertheless do not admit a gapped boundary. It is widely believed that such anyon theories cannot be realized by any stabilizer model on finite-dimensional systems. We conjecture that these CV codes go beyond codes obtained from concatenating a topological qudit code with a local encoding into CVs, and thus constitute the first example of topological codes that are intrinsic to CV systems. Moreover, we study the Hamiltonians associated with the topological CV stabilizer codes and show that, although they have a gapless spectrum, they can become gapped with the addition of a quadratic perturbation. We show that similar methods can be used to construct a gapped Hamiltonian whose anyon theory agrees with a U⁢(1)2 Chern-Simons theory. Our work initiates the study of scalable stabilizer codes that are intrinsic to CV systems and highlights how error-correcting codes can be used to design and analyze many-body systems of CVs that model lattice gauge theories.
The color code model is a crucial instance of a Calderbank-Shor-Steane (CSS)-type topological quantum error-correcting code, which notably supports transversal implementation of the full Clifford group. Its robustness against local noise is rooted in the structure of its topological excitations. From the perspective of quantum phases of matter, it is essential to understand these excitations in the thermodynamic limit. In this work, we analyze the color code model on an infinite lattice within the quasi-local C∗C^{*}C∗-algebra framework, using a cone-localized Doplicher-Haag-Roberts (DHR) analysis. We classify its irreducible anyon superselection sectors and construct explicit string operators that generate anyonic excitations from the ground state. We further examine the fusion and braiding properties of these excitations. Our results show that the topological order of the color code is described by Rep(D(Z2×Z2))≃Rep(D(Z2))⊠Rep(D(Z2))\mathsf{Rep}(D(\mathbb{Z}_2 \times \mathbb{Z}_2)) \simeq \mathsf{Rep}(D(\mathbb{Z}_2)) \boxtimes \mathsf{Rep}(D(\mathbb{Z}_2))Rep(D(Z2​×Z2​))≃Rep(D(Z2​))⊠Rep(D(Z2​)), which is equivalent to a double layer of the toric code and consistent with established analyses on finite lattices. We also establish the existence and uniqueness of the KMS state at every finite inverse temperature and derive an explicit description of the corresponding thermal distribution of stabilizer excitations.
This dissertation is concerned with quantum computation using many-body quantum systems encoded in topological codes. The interest in these topological systems has increased in recent years as devices in the lab begin to reach the fidelities required for performing arbitrarily long quantum algorithms. The most well-studied system, Kitaev's toric code, provides both a physical substrate for performing universal fault-tolerant quantum computations and a useful pedagogical tool for explaining the way other topological codes work. In this dissertation, I first review the necessary formalism for quantum information and quantum stabilizer codes, and then I introduce two families of topological codes: Kitaev's toric code and Bombin's color codes. I then present three chapters of original work. First, I explore the distinctness of encoding schemes in the color codes. Second, I introduce a model of quantum computation based on the toric code that uses adiabatic interpolations between static Hamiltonians with gaps constant in the system size. Lastly, I describe novel state distillation protocols that are naturally suited for topological architectures and show that they provide resource savings in terms of the number of required ancilla states when compared to more traditional approaches to quantum gate approximation.
Locality-preserving logical operators in topological codes are naturally fault tolerant, since they preserve the correctability of local errors. Using a correspondence between such operators and gapped domain walls, we describe a procedure for finding all locality-preserving logical operators admitted by a large and important class of topological stabilizer codes. In particular, we focus on those equivalent to a stack of a finite number of surface codes of any spatial dimension, where our procedure fully specifies the group of locality-preserving logical operators. We also present examples of how our procedure applies to codes with different boundary conditions, including color codes and toric codes, as well as more general codes such as Abelian quantum double models and codes with fermionic excitations in more than two dimensions.