Floquetifying stabiliser codes with distance-preserving rewrites

Abstract

Stabiliser codes with large weight measurements can be challenging to implement fault-tolerantly. To overcome this, we propose a Floquetification procedure which, given a stabiliser code, synthesises a novel Floquet code that only uses single- and two-qubit operations. Moreover, this procedure preserves the distance and number of logicals of the original code. The new Floquet code requires additional physical qubits. This overhead is linear in the weight of the largest measurement of the original code. Our method is based on the ZX calculus, a graphical language for representing and rewriting quantum circuits. However, a problem arises with the use of ZX in the context of rewriting error-correcting codes: ZX rewrites generally do not preserve code distance. Tackling this issue, we define the notion of distance-preserving rewrite that enables the transformation of error-correcting codes without changing their distance. These distance-preserving rewrites are used to decompose arbitrary weight stabiliser measurements into quantum circuits with single- and two-qubit operations. As we only use distance-preserving rewrites, we are guaranteed that a single error in the resulting circuit creates at most a single error on the data qubits. These decompositions enable us to generalise the Floquetification procedure of Townsend-Teague et al \cite{townsend-teagueFloquetifyingColourCode2023} to arbitrary stabiliser codes, provably preserving the distance and number of logicals of the original code.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Quantum, 2026 · DOI ↗