Fault tolerance of stabilizer channels

Abstract: Stabilizer channels are stabilizer circuits that implement logical operations while mapping from an input stabilizer code to an output stabilizer code. They are widely used to implement fault tolerant error correction and logical operations in stabilizer codes such as surface codes and LDPC codes, and more broadly in subsystem, Floquet and space-time codes. We introduce a rigorous and general formalism to analyze the fault tolerance properties of any stabilizer channel under a broad class of noise models. This includes rigorous but easy-to-work-with definitions and algorithms for the fault distance and hook faults for stabilizer channels. The generalized notion of hook faults which we introduce, defined with respect to an arbitrary subset of a circuit's faults rather than a fixed phenomenological noise model, can be leveraged for fault-tolerant circuit design. Additionally, we establish necessary conditions such that channel composition preserves the fault distance. We apply our framework to design and analyze fault tolerant stabilizer channels for surface codes, revealing novel aspects of fault tolerant circuits.