Cross-Cap Defects and Fault-Tolerant Logical Gates in the Surface Code and the Honeycomb Floquet Code

We consider the Z2 toric code, surface code, and Floquet code defined on a nonorientable surface, which can be considered as families of codes extending Shor’s nine-qubit code. We investigate the fault-tolerant logical gates of the Z2 toric code in this setup, which corresponds to e↔m exchanging symmetry of the underlying Z2 gauge theory. We find that nonorientable geometry provides a new way for the emergent symmetry to act on the code space, and discover the new realization of the fault-tolerant Hadamard gate of the two-dimensional surface code with a single cross cap connecting the vertices nonlocally along a slit, dubbed a nonorientable surface code. This Hadamard gate can be realized by a constant-depth local unitary circuit modulo nonlocality caused by a cross cap. Via folding, the nonorientable surface code can be turned into a bilayer local quantum code, where the folded cross cap is equivalent to a bilayer twist terminated on a gapped boundary and the logical Hadamard only contains local gates with intralayer couplings when being away from the cross cap, as opposed to the interlayer couplings on each site needed in the case of the folded surface code. We further obtain the complete logical Clifford gate set for a stack of nonorientable surface codes and similarly for codes defined on Klein-bottle geometries. 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 Z2 gauge theory, and illustrate the exotic dynamics of our code in terms of a condensation operator supported at a nonorientable surface. Published by the American Physical Society 2024