Local Decoders for the 2D and 4D Toric Code

Abstract

We analyze the performance of decoders for the 2D and 4D toric code which are local by construction. The 2D decoder is a cellular automaton decoder formulated by Harrington which explicitly has a finite speed of communication and computation. For a model of independent $X$ and $Z$ errors and faulty syndrome measurements with identical probability we report a threshold of $0.133\%$ for this Harrington decoder. We implement a decoder for the 4D toric code which is based on a decoder by Hastings arXiv:1312.2546 . Incorporating a method for handling faulty syndromes we estimate a threshold of $1.59\%$ for the same noise model as in the 2D case. We compare the performance of this decoder with a decoder based on a 4D version of Toom's cellular automaton rule as well as the decoding method suggested by Dennis et al. arXiv:quant-ph/0110143 .

22 pages, 21 figures; fixed typos, updated Figures 6,7,8,9