Systematic construction of stabilizer codes via gauging abelian boundary symmetries

Abstract

We propose a systematic framework to construct a $(d+1)$-dimensional stabilizer model from an initial generic d-dimensional abelian symmetry. Our approach builds upon the iterative gauging procedure, developed by one of the authors in [J. Garre-Rubio, Nature Commun. 15, 7986 (2024)][12], in which an initial symmetric state is repeatedly gauged to obtain an emergent model in one dimension higher that supports the initial symmetry at its boundary. This method not only enables the construction of emergent states and corresponding commuting stabilizer Hamiltonians of which they are ground states, but it also provides a way to construct gapped boundary conditions for these models that amount to spontaneously breaking part of the boundary symmetry. In a detailed introductory example, we showcase our paradigm by constructing three-dimensional Clifford-deformed surface codes from iteratively gauging a global 0-form symmetry that lives in two dimensions. We then provide a proof of our main result, hereby drawing upon a slight extension of the gauging procedure of Williamson. We additionally provide two more examples in $d=2$ in which different type-I fracton orders emerge from gauging initial linear subsystem and Sierpinski fractal symmetries. En passant, we provide explicit tensor network representations of all of the involved gauging maps and the emergent states.