Cross-cap defects and fault-tolerant logical gates in the surface code and the honeycomb Floquet code (2310.06917v2)

Abstract: We consider the $\mathbb{Z}_2$ toric code, surface code and Floquet code defined on a non-orientable surface, which can be considered as families of codes extending Shor's 9-qubit code. We investigate the fault-tolerant logical gates of the $\mathbb{Z}_2$ toric code in this setup, which corresponds to $e\leftrightarrow m$ exchanging symmetry of the underlying $\mathbb{Z}_2$ gauge theory. We find that non-orientable geometry provides a new way the emergent symmetry acts on the code space, and discover the new realization of the fault-tolerant Hadamard gate of 2d $\mathbb{Z}_2$ toric code on a surface with a single cross-cap, dubbed a non-orientable toric code. This Hadamard gate can be realized by a constant-depth local unitary circuit modulo non-locality caused by a cross-cap. Via folding, the non-orientable surface code can be turned into a bilayer local quantum code, where the folded cross-cap is equivalent to a bi-layer twist terminated on a gapped boundary and the logical Hadamard only contains local gates with intra-layer couplings. We further obtain the complete logical Clifford gate set for a stack of non-orientable surface codes. We then construct the honeycomb Floquet code in the presence of a single cross-cap, and find that the period of the sequential Pauli measurements acts as a $HZ$ logical gate on the single logical qubit, where the cross-cap enriches the dynamics compared with the orientable case. We find that the dynamics of the honeycomb Floquet code is precisely described by a condensation operator of the $\mathbb{Z}_2$ gauge theory, and illustrate the exotic dynamics of our code in terms of a condensation operator supported at a non-orientable surface.