Floquet implementation of a 3d fermionic toric code with full logical code space

TL;DR

This paper introduces a 3d Floquet quantum error-correcting code based on a fermionic toric code, maintaining logical qubits throughout the measurement sequence and revealing new topological phases in monitored Kitaev models.

Contribution

It presents a novel 3d Floquet code with a specific lattice geometry that preserves logical qubits and enables syndrome extraction, extending higher-dimensional Floquet codes and topological phases.

Findings

Preserves all three logical qubits during the entire measurement sequence.

Identifies a 3d lattice geometry that avoids logical information collapse.

Reveals a family of 3d monitored Kitaev models with nontrivial topological phases.

Abstract

Floquet quantum error-correcting codes provide an operationally economical route to fault tolerance by dynamically generating stabilizer structures using only two-body Pauli measurements. But while it is well established that stabilizer codes in higher spatial dimensions gain additional levels of intrinsic robustness, higher-dimensional Floquet codes have hitherto been explored only in limited scope. Here we introduce a 3d generalization of a Floquet code whose instantaneous stabilizer group realizes a 3d fermionic toric code, while crucially preserving all three logical qubits throughout the entire measurement sequence. One central ingredient is the identification of a 3d lattice geometry that generalizes the features of the Kekul\'e lattice underlying the 2d Hastings-Haah code - specifically, a structure where deleting any one edge color yields a two-color subgraph that decomposes into short, closed loops rather than homologically nontrivial chains. This loop property avoids the collapse of logical information that plagues naive sequential two-color measurement schedules on many 3d lattices. Although, for our lattice geometry, a simple 3-round cycle that sequentially measures the three types of parity checks does not expose the full error syndrome set, we show that one can append a measurement sequence to extract the missing syndromes without disturbing the logical subspace. Beyond code design, 3d tricoordinated lattice geometries define a family of 3d monitored Kitaev models, in which random measurements of the non-commuting parity checks give rise to dynamically created entangled phases with nontrivial topology. In discussing the general structure of their underlying phase diagrams and, in particular, the existence of certain quantum critical points, we again make a connection to the general preservation of logical information in time-ordered Floquet protocols.