Citation: Bombin, Hector, and Miguel Angel Martin-Delgado. "Topological quantum distillation." Physical review letters 97.18 (2006): 180501.
Web: https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0605138
Tags: Foundational, Error-correcting-codes, Defects/boundaries
This is the paper that introduced the color code.
The context for this paper is interesting. At this time, fault tolerant quantum computation was well established, and it was understood that Clifford gates are the ones which should be fault-tolerantly implementable in a (2+1) dimensional Z2-homology based topological code. However, the full promise had yet to be delivered. The approach originally introduced by Kitaev relied on embedding into larger CSS codes, and lattice surgery had yet to be introduced. This was the first two dimensional nearest neighbor topological implementation of the Clifford group.