Fragmented Topological Excitations in Generalized Hypergraph Product Codes

Abstract: Product code construction is a powerful tool for constructing quantum stabilizer codes, which serve as a promising paradigm for realizing fault-tolerant quantum computation. Furthermore, the natural mapping between stabilizer codes and the ground states of exactly solvable spin models also motivates the exploration of many-body orders in the stabilizer codes. In this work, we investigate the fracton topological orders in a family of codes obtained by a recently proposed general construction. More specifically, this code family can be regarded as a class of generalized hypergraph product (HGP) codes. We term the corresponding exactly solvable spin models \textit{orthoplex models}, based on the geometry of the stabilizers. In the 3D orthoplex model, we identify a series of intriguing properties within this model family, including non-monotonic ground state degeneracy (GSD) as a function of system size and non-Abelian lattice defects. Most remarkably, in 4D we discover \textit{fragmented topological excitations}: while such excitations manifest as discrete, isolated points in real space, their projections onto lower-dimensional subsystems form connected objects such as loops, revealing the intrinsic topological nature of these excitations. Therefore, fragmented excitations constitute an intriguing intermediate class between point-like and spatially extended topological excitations. In addition, these rich features establish the generalized HGP codes as a versatile and analytically tractable platform for studying the physics of fracton orders.