We present a quantum error correcting code with dynamically generated logical qubits. When viewed as a subsystem code, the code has no logical qubits. Nevertheless, our measurement patterns generate logical qubits, allowing the code to act as a fault
-tolerant quantum memory. Our particular code gives a model very similar to the two-dimensional toric code, but each measurement is a two-qubit Pauli measurement.
We present a quantum LDPC code family that has distance $Omega(N^{3/5}/operatorname{polylog}(N))$ and $tildeTheta(N^{3/5})$ logical qubits. This is the first quantum LDPC code construction which achieves distance greater than $N^{1/2} operatorname{po
lylog}(N)$. The construction is based on generalizing the homological product of codes to a fiber bundle.
Motivated by recent work showing that a quantum error correcting code can be generated by hybrid dynamics of unitaries and measurements, we study the long time behavior of such systems. We demonstrate that even in the mixed phase, a maximally mixed i
nitial density matrix is purified on a time scale equal to the Hilbert space dimension (i.e., exponential in system size), albeit with noisy dynamics at intermediate times which we connect to Dyson Brownian motion. In contrast, we show that free fermion systems -- i.e., ones where the unitaries are generated by quadratic Hamiltonians and the measurements are of fermion bilinears -- purify in a time quadratic in the system size. In particular, a volume law phase for the entanglement entropy cannot be sustained in a free fermion system.
We construct an exactly solvable commuting projector model for a $4+1$ dimensional ${mathbb Z}_2$ symmetry-protected topological phase (SPT) which is outside the cohomology classification of SPTs. The model is described by a decorated domain wall con
struction, with three-fermion Walker-Wang phases on the domain walls. We describe the anomalous nature of the phase in several ways. One interesting feature is that, in contrast to in-cohomology phases, the effective ${mathbb Z}_2$ symmetry on a $3+1$ dimensional boundary cannot be described by a quantum circuit and instead is a nontrivial quantum cellular automaton (QCA). A related property is that a codimension-two defect (for example, the termination of a ${mathbb Z}_2$ domain wall at a trivial boundary) will carry nontrivial chiral central charge $4$ mod $8$. We also construct a gapped symmetric topologically-ordered boundary state for our model, which constitutes an anomalous symmetry enriched topological phase outside of the classification of arXiv:1602.00187, and define a corresponding anomaly indicator.
We consider the group structure of quantum cellular automata (QCA) modulo circuits and show that it is abelian even without assuming the presence of ancillas, at least for most reasonable choices of control space; this is a corollary of a general met
hod of ancilla removal. Further, we show how to define a group of QCA that is well-defined without needing to use families, by showing how to construct a coherent family containing an arbitrary finite QCA; the coherent family consists of QCA on progressively finer systems of qudits where any two members are related by a shallow quantum circuit. This construction applied to translation invariant QCA shows that all translation invariant QCA in three dimensions and all translation invariant Clifford QCA in any dimension are coherent.
We analyze the class of Generalized Double Semion (GDS) models in arbitrary dimensions from the point of view of lattice Hamiltonians. We show that on a $d$-dimensional spatial manifold $M$ the dual of the GDS is equivalent, up to constant depth loca
l quantum circuits, to a group cohomology theory tensored with lower dimensional cohomology models that depend on the manifold $M$. We comment on the space-time topological quantum field theory (TQFT) interpretation of this result. We also investigate the GDS in the presence of time reversal symmetry, showing that it forms a non-trivial symmetry enriched toric code phase in odd spatial dimensions.
We construct a three-dimensional quantum cellular automaton (QCA), an automorphism of the local operator algebra on a lattice of qubits, which disentangles the ground state of the Walker-Wang three fermion model. We show that if this QCA can be reali
zed by a quantum circuit of constant depth, then there exists a two-dimensional commuting projector Hamiltonian which realizes the three fermion topological order which is widely believed not to be possible. We conjecture in accordance with this belief that this QCA is not a quantum circuit of constant depth, and we provide two further pieces of evidence to support the conjecture. We show that this QCA maps every local Pauli operator to a local Pauli operator, but is not a Clifford circuit of constant depth. Further, we show that if the three-dimensional QCA can be realized by a quantum circuit of constant depth, then there exists a two-dimensional QCA acting on fermionic degrees of freedom which cannot be realized by a quantum circuit of constant depth; i.e., we prove the existence of a nontrivial QCA in either three or two dimensions. The square of our three-dimensional QCA can be realized by a quantum circuit of constant depth, and this suggests the existence of a $mathbb{Z}_2$ invariant of a QCA in higher dimensions, totally distinct from the classification by positive rationals (i.e., by one integer index for each prime) in one dimension. In an appendix, unrelated to the main body of this paper, we give a fermionic generalization of a result of Bravyi and Vyalyi on ground states of 2-local commuting Hamiltonians.
Recently we proposed a family of magic state distillation protocols that obtains asymptotic performance that is conjectured to be optimal. This family depends upon several codes, called inner codes and outer codes. We presented some small examples of
these codes as well as an analysis of codes in the asymptotic limit. Here, we analyze such protocols in an intermediate size regime, using hundreds to thousands of qubits. We use BCH inner codes, combined with various outer codes. We extend our protocols by adding error correction in some cases. We present a variety of protocols in various input error regimes; in many cases these protocols require significantly fewer input magic states to obtain a given output error than previous protocols.
We present an infinite family of protocols to distill magic states for $T$-gates that has a low space overhead and uses an asymptotic number of input magic states to achieve a given target error that is conjectured to be optimal. The space overhead,
defined as the ratio between the physical qubits to the number of output magic states, is asymptotically constant, while both the number of input magic states used per output state and the $T$-gate depth of the circuit scale linearly in the logarithm of the target error $delta$ (up to $log log 1/delta$). Unlike other distillation protocols, this protocol achieves this performance without concatenation and the input magic states are injected at various steps in the circuit rather than all at the start of the circuit. The protocol can be modified to distill magic states for other gates at the third level of the Clifford hierarchy, with the same asymptotic performance. The protocol relies on the construction of weakly self-dual CSS codes with many logical qubits and large distance, allowing us to implement control-SWAPs on multiple qubits. We call this code the inner code. The control-SWAPs are then used to measure properties of the magic state and detect errors, using another code that we call the outer code. Alternatively, we use weakly-self dual CSS codes which implement controlled Hadamards for the inner code, reducing circuit depth. We present several specific small examples of this protocol.
