No-Go Theorem on Fault Tolerant Gadgets for Multiple Logical Qubits

TL;DR

This paper proves fundamental limitations on fault-tolerant implementations of the full logical Clifford group in stabilizer codes encoding multiple logical qubits, showing such implementations are impossible with transversal, fold-transversal, or automorphism-based gadgets.

Contribution

It establishes a no-go theorem demonstrating the impossibility of fully transversal Clifford implementations on multiple logical qubits in stabilizer codes, and introduces the concept of k-fold transversal gadgets.

Findings

No stabilizer code admits fully transversal Clifford on more than one logical qubit.

Fold-transversal implementations are impossible for more than two logical qubits.

Automorphism-based constructions cannot realize full Clifford on multiple logical qubits.

Abstract

Identifying stabilizer codes that admit fault-tolerant implementations of the full logical Clifford group would significantly advance fault-tolerant quantum computation. Motivated by this goal, we study several classes of fault-tolerant gadget constructions consisting of Clifford gates acting on the physical qubits, including transversal gadgets, code automorphisms, and fold-transversal gadgets. While stabilizer codes encoding a single logical qubit, most notably the [[7,1,3]] Steane code, are known to admit transversal implementations of the full logical Clifford group, no analogous examples are known for codes encoding multiple logical qubits. In this work, we prove a no-go theorem establishing that no stabilizer code admits a fully transversal implementation of the Clifford group on more than one logical qubit. We further strengthen this result by showing that fold-transversal implementations of the full logical Clifford group are impossible for stabilizer codes encoding more than two logical qubits. More generally, we introduce the notion of k-fold transversal gadgets and prove that implementing the full Clifford group on k logical qubits requires at least k-fold transversal gadgets at the physical level. In addition, we analyze code-automorphism based constructions and demonstrate that they also fail to realize the full Clifford group on multiple logical qubits for any stabilizer code. Together, these results place fundamental constraints on fault-tolerant Clifford gadget design and show that stabilizer codes supporting the full logical Clifford group on multiple logical qubits via these architectures do not exist. Since the Clifford group is a core component of universal gate sets, our findings imply that quantum computing with codes encoding multiple logical qubits within a single code block necessarily entails more complex constructions for fault tolerance.