Transversal Gates in Nonadditive Quantum Codes
Abstract
Transversal gates play a crucial role in suppressing error propagation in fault-tolerant quantum computation, yet they are intrinsically constrained: any nontrivial code encoding a single logical qubit admits only a finite subgroup of as its transversal operations. We introduce a systematic framework for searching codes with specified transversal groups by parametrizing their logical subspaces on the Stiefel manifold and minimizing a composite loss that enforces both the Knill-Laflamme conditions and a target transversal-group structure. Applying this method, we uncover a new code admitting a transversal gate (transversal group ), the smallest known distance code supporting non-Clifford transversal gates, as well as several new codes realizing the binary icosahedral group . We further propose the \emph{Subset-Sum-Linear-Programming} (SS-LP) construction for codes with transversal \emph{diagonal} gates, which dramatically shrinks the search space by reducing to integer partitions subject to linear constraints. In a more constrained form, the method also applies directly to the binary-dihedral groups . Specializing to , the SS-LP method yields codes for all with , including the first examples supporting transversal gate () and gate (), improving on the previous smallest examples and . Extending the SS-LP approach to , we construct new codes for , including one supporting a transversal gate (). These results reveal a far richer landscape of nonadditive codes than previously recognized and underscore a deeper connection between quantum error correction and the algebraic constraints on transversal gate groups.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2504.20847,
title = {Transversal Gates in Nonadditive Quantum Codes},
author = {Chao Zhang and Zipeng Wu and Shilin Huang and Bei Zeng},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.20847},
year = {2025}
}