Low-overhead non-Clifford fault-tolerant circuits for all non-chiral abelian topological phases

Abstract

We propose a family of explicit geometrically local circuits on a 2-dimensional planar grid of qudits, realizing any abelian non-chiral topological phase as an actively error-corrected fault-tolerant memory. These circuits are constructed from measuring 1-form symmetries in discrete fixed-point path integrals, which we express through cellular cohomology and higher-order cup products. The specific path integral we use is the abelian Dijkgraaf-Witten state sum on a 3-dimensional cellulation, which is a spacetime representation of the twisted quantum double model. The resulting circuits are based on a syndrome extraction circuit of the (qudit) stabilizer toric code, into which we insert non-Clifford phase gates that implement the “twist''. The overhead compared to the toric code is moderate, in contrast to known constructions for twisted abelian phases. We also show that other architectures for the (qudit) toric code phase, like measurement-based topological quantum computation or Floquet codes, can be enriched with phase gates to implement twisted quantum doubles instead of their untwisted versions. As a further result, we prove fault tolerance under arbitrary local (including non-Pauli) noise for a very general class of topological circuits that we call 1-form symmetric fixed-point circuits. This notion unifies the circuits in this paper as well as the stabilizer toric code, subsystem toric code, measurement-based topological quantum computation, or the (CSS) honeycomb Floquet code. We also demonstrate how our method can be adapted to construct fault-tolerant circuits for specific non-Abelian phases. In the appendix we present an explicit combinatorial procedure to define formulas for higher cup products on arbitrary cellulations, which might be interesting in its own right to the TQFT and topological-phases community.