A local automaton for the 2D toric code

Abstract

We construct a local decoder for the 2D toric code using ideas from the hierarchical classical cellular automata of Tsirelson and Gács. Our decoder is a circuit of strictly local quantum operations preserving a logical state for exponential time in the presence of circuit-level noise without the need for non-local classical computation or communication. Our construction is not translation invariant in spacetime, but can be made time-translation invariant in 3D with stacks of 2D toric codes. This solves the open problem of constructing a local topological quantum memory below four dimensions.