Beyond stabilizer codes II: Clifford codes
Andreas Klappenecker, Martin Rötteler · IEEE Transactions on Information Theory · 2002
For pt. I see ibid., vol.48, no.8, p.2392-95 (2002). Knill (1996) introduced a generalization of stabilizer codes, called Clifford codes. It remained unclear whether or not Clifford codes can be superior to stabilizer codes. We show that Clifford codes are stabilizer codes provided that the abstract error group has an Abelian index group. In particular, if the errors are modeled by tensor products of Pauli matrices, then the associated Clifford codes are necessarily stabilizer codes.