Complex abelian varieties and quantum error correction: a mathematical framework for GKP codes

Abstract

We study a class of quantum error-correcting codes through the geometry of complex abelian varieties. These codes, introduced by Gottesman--Kitaev--Preskill, are built from symplectically integral lattices and therefore naturally define polarized complex abelian varieties. We give a precise mathematical formulation of this relationship and extend it to a dictionary between the main structures of GKP code theory and classical objects in the theory of abelian varieties. For instance, under this dictionary, the finite-dimensional code space becomes the space of theta functions $H^0(X, L)$, logical Pauli gates arise from the theta group, passive logical Clifford gates correspond to automorphisms of the polarized abelian variety, and concatenation with stabilizer codes corresponds to isogeny. We also prove several key results that give precise mathematical formulations of statements about these codes that often appear in heuristic form in the physics literature. In particular, we prove that the encoding is asymptotically isometric, that every logical Clifford gate is realized by a Gaussian unitary, and that, for noise of small variance, the failure probability is governed to first order by the shortest nontrivial displacement in the kernel of the polarization isogeny, a systolic invariant of the underlying polarization. This leads naturally to optimization problems on the moduli space of polarized abelian varieties.