Topological color code and symmetry-protected topological phases

TL;DR

This paper explores the connection between topological color codes, symmetry-protected topological phases, and domain walls, revealing new excitations, braiding statistics, and implications for fault-tolerant quantum computation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel characterization of excitations in color codes as SPT phases and links them to domain walls and logical gates, expanding understanding of topological quantum codes.

Findings

SPT excitations are superpositions of electric charges.

Domain walls can exchange excitations in the color code.

Magnetic fluxes exhibit non-trivial three-loop braiding in 3D.

Abstract

We study $(d-1)$-dimensional excitations in the $d$-dimensional color code that are created by transversal application of the $R_{d}$ phase operators on connected subregions of qubits. We find that such excitations are superpositions of electric charges and can be characterized by fixed-point wavefunctions of $(d-1)$-dimensional bosonic SPT phases with $(\mathbb{Z}_{2})^{\otimes d}$ symmetry. While these SPT excitations are localized on $(d-1)$-dimensional boundaries, their creation requires operations acting on all qubits inside the boundaries, reflecting the non-triviality of emerging SPT wavefunctions. Moreover, these SPT-excitations can be physically realized as transparent gapped domain walls which exchange excitations in the color code. Namely, in the three-dimensional color code, the domain wall, associated with the transversal $R_{3}$ operator, exchanges a magnetic flux and a composite of a magnetic flux and loop-like SPT excitation, revealing rich possibilities of boundaries in higher-dimensional TQFTs. We also find that magnetic fluxes and loop-like SPT excitations exhibit non-trivial three-loop braiding statistics in three dimensions as a result of the fact that the $R_{3}$ phase operator belongs to the third-level of the Clifford hierarchy. We believe that the connection between SPT excitations, fault-tolerant logical gates and gapped domain walls, established in this paper, can be generalized to a large class of topological quantum codes and TQFTs.