Fault-tolerant logical gates in quantum error-correcting codes

Recently, Bravyi and K\"onig have shown that there is a tradeoff between fault-tolerantly implementable logical gates and geometric locality of stabilizer codes. They consider locality-preserving operations which are implemented by a constant depth geometrically local circuit and are thus fault-tolerant by construction. In particular, they shown that, for local stabilizer codes in D spatial dimensions, locality preserving gates are restricted to a set of unitary gates known as the D-th level of the Clifford hierarchy. In this paper, we elaborate this idea and provide several extensions and applications of their characterization in various directions. First, we present a new no-go theorem for self-correcting quantum memory. Namely, we prove that a three-dimensional stabilizer Hamiltonian with a locality-preserving implementation of a non-Clifford gate cannot have a macroscopic energy barrier. Second, we prove that the code distance of a D-dimensional local stabilizer code with non-trivial locality-preserving m-th level Clifford logical gate is upper bounded by $O(L^{D+1-m})$. For codes with non-Clifford gates (m>2), this improves the previous best bound by Bravyi and Terhal. Third we prove that a qubit loss threshold of codes with non-trivial transversal m-th level Clifford logical gate is upper bounded by 1/m. As such, no family of fault-tolerant codes with transversal gates in increasing level of the Clifford hierarchy may exist. This result applies to arbitrary stabilizer and subsystem codes, and is not restricted to geometrically-local codes. Fourth we extend the result of Bravyi and K\"onig to subsystem codes. A technical difficulty is that, unlike stabilizer codes, the so-called union lemma does not apply to subsystem codes. This problem is avoided by assuming the presence of error threshold in a subsystem code, and the same conclusion as Bravyi-K\"onig is recovered.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figure

Clifford Gates by Code Deformation

Topological subsystem color codes add to the advantages of topological codes an important feature: error tracking only involves measuring 2-local operators in a two dimensional setting. Unfortunately, known methods to compute with them were highly unpractical. We give a mechanism to implement all Clifford gates by code deformation in a planar setting. In particular, we use twist braiding and express its effects in terms of certain colored Majorana operators.Comment: Extended version with more detail

On Subsystem Codes Beating the Hamming or Singleton Bound

Subsystem codes are a generalization of noiseless subsystems, decoherence free subspaces, and quantum error-correcting codes. We prove a Singleton bound for GF(q)-linear subsystem codes. It follows that no subsystem code over a prime field can beat the Singleton bound. On the other hand, we show the remarkable fact that there exist impure subsystem codes beating the Hamming bound. A number of open problems concern the comparison in performance of stabilizer and subsystem codes. One of the open problems suggested by Poulin's work asks whether a subsystem code can use fewer syndrome measurements than an optimal MDS stabilizer code while encoding the same number of qudits and having the same distance. We prove that linear subsystem codes cannot offer such an improvement under complete decoding.Comment: 18 pages more densely packed than classically possibl