English

A QCA for every SPT

Strongly Correlated Electrons 2025-10-14 v2 Quantum Physics

Abstract

In three dimensions, there is a nontrivial quantum cellular automaton (QCA) which disentangles the three-fermion Walker--Wang model, a model whose action depends on Stiefel--Whitney classes of the spacetime manifold. Here we present a conjectured generalization to higher dimensions. For an arbitrary symmetry protected topological phase of time reversal whose action depends on Stiefel--Whitney classes, we construct a corresponding QCA that we conjecture disentangles that phase. Some of our QCA are Clifford, and we relate these to a classification theorem of Clifford QCA. We identify Clifford QCA in 4m+14m+1 dimensions, for which we find a low-depth circuit description using non-Clifford gates but not with Clifford gates.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2407.07951,
  title  = {A QCA for every SPT},
  author = {Lukasz Fidkowski and Jeongwan Haah and Matthew B. Hastings},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.07951},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

v2, corrects and clarifies the Stiefel Whitney - QCA correspondence

R2 v1 2026-06-28T17:36:16.968Z