Ground subspaces of topological phases of matter as error correcting codes

Abstract Topological quantum computing is believed to be inherently fault-tolerant. One mathematical justification would be to prove that ground subspaces or ground state manifolds of topological phases of matter behave as error correction codes with macroscopic distance. While this is widely assumed and used as a definition of topological phases of matter in the physics literature, besides the doubled abelian anyon models in Kitaev’s seminal paper, no non-abelian models are proven to be so mathematically until recently. Cui et al extended the theorem from doubled abelian anyon models to all Kitaev models based on any finite group (Cui et al., 0000). Those proofs are very explicit using detailed knowledge of the Hamiltonians, so it seems to be hard to further extend the proof to cover other models such as the Levin-Wen. We pursue a totally different approach based on topological quantum field theories (TQFTs), and prove that a lattice implementation of the disk axiom and annulus axiom in TQFTs as essentially the equivalence of TQO1 and TQO2 conditions in Bravyi et al. (2010) and Bravyi et al. (2011). We confirm the error correcting properties of ground subspaces for topological lattice Hamiltonian schemas of the Levin-Wen model and Dijkgraaf-Witten TQFTs by providing a lattice version of the disk axiom and annulus of the underlying TQFTs. The error correcting property of ground subspaces is also shared by gapped fracton models such as the Haah codes (Haah and Jeongwan, 2011; Haah, 2013). We propose to characterize topological phases of matter via error correcting properties, and refer to gapped fracton models as lax-topological.