Local fault-tolerant error correction with simulated confinement

I will discuss recent work on surface-code decoders where all operations---including classical data processing---are geometrically local and homogeneous in spacetime. These decoders use a classical cellular automaton to simulate an attractive confining interaction between anyons, an idea with a long history. I will show that previous constructions in this direction do not have a threshold, and will describe a simple procedure by which a threshold can be restored. The result is a fully-parallelized decoder which has essentially zero latency, can be implemented with a local Lindbladian, and has a competitively large error threshold. This talk will be based on arXiv:2506.03266 and arXiv:2510.08056. 

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