Description
Member of a family of two-dimensionally local CSS QLDPC codes on a planar square lattice with open boundaries, generalizing the surface code by allowing stabilizer generators of weight greater than four whose supports are confined to a box of fixed size \((D+1)\times(D+1)\) rather than to nearest-neighbor edges only. Data qubits sit on the edges of the lattice and stabilizer checks (tiles) are placed at its vertices in a translationally invariant fashion in the bulk.
A tile code is specified by a local structure together with a global structure. The local structure is a pair of \(X\)- and \(Z\)-type stabilizer tiles confined to a box of size \((D+1)\times(D+1)\) and chosen so that any relative placement of an \(X\)- and a \(Z\)-tile has even overlap, ensuring commutativity. The global structure is a rectangular layout of bulk-stabilizer positions. Boundary stabilizers are then added on the four sides, after which qubits not supported by any stabilizer and stabilizers with empty support are removed. Under two conditions, the construction yields an \([[n,k,d]]\) code with logical dimension \(k=2D^2\) [3]. The conditions are that the tiles not be confined to a strip of width or height \(D\) and that they give rise to total topological order. Total topological order strengthens topological order by requiring that any local Pauli operator commuting with all stabilizers included in a quadrant of the plane be a product of included stabilizers [3]. Under the same conditions, the logical operators admit a canonical symplectic basis localized along the lattice boundary and generated by a cellular automaton with \(2D^2\) update rules, making them amenable to lattice-surgery techniques [3]. Boundary layouts that admit commuting corner stabilizers reduce the logical dimension by one per added corner stabilizer. The construction admits higher-dimensional generalizations [3; Sec. 5.4], but the term tile code refers by default to the two-dimensional case treated here.
With a \(3\times 3\) box and weight-6 stabilizers, the construction yields a \([[288,8,12]]\) code (first found in Ref. [1]), a fourfold improvement in the code-parameter efficiency \(kd^2/n\) over the rotated surface code. Weight-8 stabilizers in a \(3\times 3\) box give a \([[288,8,14]]\) code, and in a \(4\times 4\) box they give \([[288,18,13]]\) and \([[512,18,19]]\) codes [2]. The last of these gains more than a factor of twelve in \(kd^2/n\) over the rotated surface code. The planar (unrotated and rotated) surface code on a square lattice, the two-dimensionally local (pruned) hypergraph-product constructions such as open-boundary La-cross codes, and the open-boundary (planar) versions of bivariate bicycle codes are recovered as special cases.
Protection
Code distance scales with the lattice dimensions provided the stabilizer tiles satisfy the topological-order condition. Distances of explicit examples are estimated with a probabilistic algorithm and then confirmed exactly using integer linear programming [2].Rate
Logical dimension \(k=2D^2\) for stabilizer tiles confined to a \((D+1)\times(D+1)\) box but not to a strip and satisfying the total-topological-order condition [3]. Boundary layouts admitting commuting corner stabilizers reduce this by one per added corner stabilizer. The code-parameter efficiency \(kd^2/n\) reaches 12.7 for the \([[512,18,19]]\) code, more than twelve times that of the rotated surface code [2].Gates
For stabilizer tiles not confined to a strip and giving rise to total topological order, derived automorphisms \(T_x\) and \(T_y\) implement products of logical CNOT gates fault-tolerantly and with low overhead by extending the lattice on one side and shrinking it on the other. Their action on the logical space is multiplication by \(x\) or \(y\) on \(\mathbb{F}_2[x^{\pm},y^{\pm}]/(f,g)\) [3]. This operation is trivial for the surface code.Fault Tolerance
Directional tile codes, a subfamily whose stabilizer supports form an ordered connected string, admit a depth-\(w\) syndrome-extraction circuit for weight-\(w\) stabilizer generators built only from nearest-neighbor iSWAP gates on a square grid [4]. Routing qubits are inserted near the boundary to keep every step of the walk nearest-neighbor.Barbell codes, a subfamily of tile codes whose check qubits are paired so that each pair shares one near-local coupler, admit an explicit depth-\((w+4)\) syndrome-extraction cycle for weight-\(w\) stabilizer generators, based on superdense syndrome extraction [5,6].Fault-tolerant logical multi-qubit Pauli measurements, both within a single patch and between two patches, can be performed without additional connectivity requirements via the protocol of Ref. [7].Cousins
- Kitaev surface code— Tile codes generalize the planar surface code. The unrotated planar surface code is recovered by choosing the surface-code tiles together with an appropriate layout [2].
- Rotated surface code— The planar rotated surface code is recovered from the tile-code construction using a rotated layout [2]. The most efficient tile codes outperform the rotated surface code in the efficiency \(kd^2/n\) by factors of up to more than 12 [2].
- Bivariate bicycle (BB) code— Tile codes are open-boundary (planar) analogues of bivariate bicycle (BB) codes, which arise by tiling a torus with stabilizer tiles [2]. Tile codes instead have open boundaries and thus retain true \(O(1)\)-locality on a planar 2D lattice [2]. Sharing the same bulk stabilizer tiles does not yield the same code: the planar \([[288,8,12]]\) tile code has the same bulk stabilizers as the \((-2,2)\)-BB code, which requires a \(217\times 217\) torus to attain its maximal logical dimension \(k=16\) and yields a \([[98,6,12]]\) code on a \(7\times 7\) torus [1]. The logical dimension of a BB code is determined by the period of the same cellular automaton that generates tile-code logical operators [3].
- Hypergraph product (HGP) code— Pruned hypergraph-product constructions of planar BB codes are recovered by the tile-code construction using an unrotated bulk-stabilizer layout [2].
- La-cross code— Open-boundary La-cross codes are instances of tile codes whose stabilizers are induced by univariate polynomials [3].
- Multivariate multicycle (MM) code— Tile codes and MM codes with two polynomials in two variables arise from the same three-term Koszul complex with qubits placed at the middle level: MM codes take the complex over the group algebra \(\mathbb{F}_q[x,y]/\langle x^{\ell_1}-1,y^{\ell_2}-1\rangle\), yielding periodic boundaries, while tile codes take the higher global sections \(R^1\Gamma\) of the corresponding Koszul complex of vector bundles on \(\mathbb{P}^1\times\mathbb{P}^1\), yielding open boundaries [3,8]. The tile-code construction extends to \(t\) spatial dimensions using \((\mathbb{P}^1)^{t}\) and \(t\) polynomials in \(t\) variables, yielding codes that are local in \(t\) rather than two dimensions [3; Sec. 5.4]. For example, the four-dimensional instance built from four polynomials in \(w,x,y,z\) with \(L=M=N=P=3\) has parameters \([[486,24,d]]\) with \(10\leq d\leq 15\) [3], the same length and logical dimension as the \([[486,24,12]]\) MM code with \(t=4\) over \(\mathbb{Z}_3^{4}\) [8].
- Abelian topological code— The stabilizer tiles of a tile code have to give rise to topological order in the bulk for the code distance to scale with the layout dimensions [2], and to the stronger total topological order for the logical dimension to be \(k=2D^2\) [3]. This is an extra assumption and not part of the definition: writing the \(X\)-tile as a pair of Laurent polynomials \(f,g\) over \(\mathbb{F}_2[x^{\pm},y^{\pm}]\), a sufficient algebraic criterion for total topological order is that the restrictions of \(f\) and \(g\) to each quadrant polynomial ring admit no common non-unit factor and satisfy an additional isomorphism condition [3]. Admissible tiles for which \(f\) and \(g\) share a non-unit factor, e.g., \(f=g=1+x+y\) in a \(2\times 2\) box, can yield valid tile codes such as \([[32,2,2]]\) and \([[288,2,2]]\) whose distance does not scale. Planar tile codes can be obtained from bivariate bicycle codes by condensing anyons of the underlying Abelian topological order at the boundary [1].
Primary Hierarchy
References
- [1]
- Z. Liang, J. N. Eberhardt, and Y.-A. Chen, “Planar quantum low-density parity-check codes with open boundaries”, (2025) arXiv:2504.08887
- [2]
- V. Steffan, S. H. Choe, N. P. Breuckmann, F. R. F. Pereira, and J. N. Eberhardt, “Tile Codes: High-Efficiency Quantum Codes on a Lattice with Boundary”, (2025) arXiv:2504.09171
- [3]
- N. P. Breuckmann, S. H. Choe, J. N. Eberhardt, F. R. F. Pereira, and V. Steffan, “Logical Operators and Derived Automorphisms of Tile Codes”, (2025) arXiv:2511.14589
- [4]
- B. Gu, T. Noszko, V. Steffan, J. N. Eberhardt, J. Roffe, J. Eisert, and S. Koutsioumpas, “Nearest-neighbour gates are all you need: High-rate quantum low-density parity-check codes on a planar grid”, (2026) arXiv:2606.19482
- [5]
- C. Gidney and C. Jones, “New circuits and an open source decoder for the color code”, (2023) arXiv:2312.08813
- [6]
- S. H. Choe, V. Steffan, F. Vigneau, P. Parrado-Rodríguez, H.-S. Ku, M. Leib, F. R. F. Pereira, and F. Šimkovic, “Barbell Codes: qLDPC Codes for Superconducting Quantum Hardware”, (2026) arXiv:2606.06062
- [7]
- Y. Yang, G. Zhang, and Y. Li, “Planar fault-tolerant logical measurements with low qubit overhead”, npj Quantum Information (2026) arXiv:2506.18061 DOI
- [8]
- F. A. Mian, O. Gwilliam, and S. Krastanov, “Multivariate Multicycle Codes for Complete Single-Shot Decoding”, (2026) arXiv:2601.18879
Page edit log
- Victor V. Albert (2026-08-26) — most recent
- Victor V. Albert (2026-06-11)
- Tomasz Andrzejewski (2026-06-11)
Cite as:
“Tile quantum code”, The Error Correction Zoo (V. V. Albert & P. Faist, eds.), 2026. https://errorcorrectionzoo.org/c/tile, arXiv:2606.11484