Unfolding the color code

The topological color code and the toric code are two leading candidates for realizing fault-tolerant quantum computation. Here we show that the color code on a d -dimensional closed manifold is equivalent to multiple decoupled copies of the d -dimensional toric code up to local unitary transformati...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Aleksander Kubica, Beni Yoshida, Fernando Pastawski
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: IOP Publishing 2015-01-01
Series:New Journal of Physics
Subjects:
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1088/1367-2630/17/8/083026
Description
Summary:The topological color code and the toric code are two leading candidates for realizing fault-tolerant quantum computation. Here we show that the color code on a d -dimensional closed manifold is equivalent to multiple decoupled copies of the d -dimensional toric code up to local unitary transformations and adding or removing ancilla qubits. Our result not only generalizes the proven equivalence for d = 2, but also provides an explicit recipe of how to decouple independent components of the color code, highlighting the importance of colorability in the construction of the code. Moreover, for the d -dimensional color code with $d+1$ boundaries of $d+1$ distinct colors, we find that the code is equivalent to multiple copies of the d -dimensional toric code which are attached along a $(d-1)$ -dimensional boundary. In particular, for d = 2, we show that the (triangular) color code with boundaries is equivalent to the (folded) toric code with boundaries. We also find that the d -dimensional toric code admits logical non-Pauli gates from the d th level of the Clifford hierarchy, and thus saturates the bound by Bravyi and König. In particular, we show that the logical d -qubit control- Z gate can be fault-tolerantly implemented on the stack of d copies of the toric code by a local unitary transformation.
ISSN:1367-2630