Modular-qudit code

A convenient and often considered error set is the modular-qudit analogue of the Pauli string basis for qubit codes. For a single qudit, this set consists of products of powers of the qudit Pauli matrices \(X\) and \(Z\), which act on computational basis states \(|k\rangle\) for \(k\in\mathbb{Z}_q\) as \begin{align} X\left|k\right\rangle =\left|k+1\right\rangle \,\,\text{ and }\,\,Z\left|k\right\rangle =e^{i\frac{2\pi}{q}k}\left|k\right\rangle ~, \end{align} with addition performed modulo \(q\). For multiple qudits, error set elements are tensor products of elements of the single-qudit error set.

The Pauli error set is a unitary basis for linear operators on the multi-qudit Hilbert space that is orthonormal under the Hilbert-Schmidt inner product; it is a nice error basis [1]. The distance associated with this set is often the minimum weight of a qudit Pauli string that implements a nontrivial logical operation in the code.