Short qudit triorthogonal codes from doubling

Abstract

We construct short triorthogonal codes for qudits of odd prime dimension by generalizing doubling, which combines a triorthogonal code with a code admitting a transversal phase gate, and raises the distance by up to two. This gives codes with parameters $[[28,1,4]]_3$, $[[37,1,5]]_3$, $[[72,1,6]]_3$, $[[118,1,8]]_3$, $[[33,1,5]]_5$ and $[[20,1,4]]_7$, each shorter than the cyclic, concatenated and Reed-Muller codes of the same distance, and a doubling construction of the $[[15,1,3]]_3$ code. When the columns of a generator matrix are regarded as charged points, triorthogonality becomes the vanishing of multipole moments up to octupole order, and doubling becomes a double layer of opposite charges; this picture explains why inputs with nontrivial coefficients can give shorter codes. We also show by exhaustive search that the shortest codes of distance three have length $11$ for $p=5$ and length $7$ for $p=7$. Combined with high-rate distance-two codes, the new codes reduce the cost of qutrit magic state distillation by up to an order of magnitude in regimes with high input noise.