Qudit stabilizers beyond the free case and the twisted Kitaev model

Abstract

We study the stabiliser formalism for qudits of arbitrary dimension $d$. In the free case, we show that the basic theorem of the stabiliser formalism remains valid: if the stabiliser subgroup $H$ is free as a $Z/dZ$-module and contains no non-trivial scalars, then the protected space $V^H$ is naturally identified with the state space of a smaller number of qudits of the same dimension, and the quotient $N(H)/H$ is identified with the Pauli group on a smaller number of qudits. We then remove the freeness assumption and describe the resulting structure in general. In this case, the protected space is identified with a tensor product of qudit spaces of possibly smaller dimensions, and the quotient $N(H)/H$ is described by a corresponding product of qudit Pauli groups, possibly of smaller dimensions, over a common center. We also characterise the shifted free case, which is exactly the situation in which $N(H)/H$ is again an ordinary qudit Pauli group. Our approach is algebraic and uniform, and applies in particular to the qudit Kitaev model and to its shifted and twisted variants.