We analyse stability of the four-dimensional Kitaev model - a candidate for scalable quantum memory - in finite temperature within the weak coupling Markovian limit. It is shown that, below a critical temperature, certain topological qubit observable
s X and Z possess relaxation times exponentially long in the size of the system. Their construction involves polynomial in systems size algorithm which uses as an input the results of measurements performed on all individual spins. We also discuss the drawbacks of such candidate for quantum memory and mention the implications of the stability of qubit for statistical mechanics.
The thermalization process of the 2D Kitaev model is studied within the Markovian weak coupling approximation. It is shown that its largest relaxation time is bounded from above by a constant independent of the system size and proportional to $exp(2D
elta/kT)$ where $Delta$ is an energy gap over the 4-fold degenerate ground state. This means that the 2D Kitaev model is not an example of a memory, neither quantum nor classical.
