Protecting information via probabilistic cellular automata

Abstract

Probabilistic cellular automata describe the dynamics of classical spin models, which, for sufficiently small temperature $T$, can serve as classical memory capable of storing information even in the presence of nonzero external magnetic field $h$. In this article, we study a recently-introduced probabilistic cellular automaton, the sweep rule, and map out a region of two coexisting stable phases in the $(T,h)$ plane. We also find that the sweep rule belongs to the weak two-dimensional Ising universality class. Our work is a step towards understanding how simple geometrically-local error-correction strategies can protect information encoded into complex noisy systems, such as topological quantum error-correcting codes.