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Various realizations of Kitaev’s surface code perform surprisingly well for biased Pauli noise. Attracted by these potential gains, we study the performance of Clifford-deformed surface codes (CDSCs) obtained from the surface code by the application of single-qubit Clifford operators. We first analyze CDSCs on the 3×3 square lattice and find that, depending on the noise bias, their logical error rates can differ by orders of magnitude. To explain the observed behavior, we introduce the effective distance d′, which reduces to the standard distance for unbiased noise. To study CDSC performance in the thermodynamic limit, we focus on random CDSCs. Using the statistical mechanical mapping for quantum codes, we uncover a phase diagram that describes random CDSC families with 50% threshold at infinite bias. In the high-threshold region, we further demonstrate that typical code realizations outperform the thresholds and subthreshold logical error rates, at finite bias, of the best-known translationally invariant codes. We demonstrate the practical relevance of these random CDSC families by constructing a translation-invariant CDSC belonging to a high-performance random CDSC family. We also show that our translation-invariant CDSC outperforms well-known translation-invariant CDSCs, such as the XZZX and XY codes. 

Tailored topological stabilizer codes in two dimensions have been shown to exhibit high-storage-threshold error rates and improved subthreshold performance under biased Pauli noise. Three-dimensional (3D) topological codes can allow for several advantages including a transversal implementation of non-Clifford logical gates, single-shot decoding strategies, and parallelized decoding in the case of fracton codes, as well as construction of fractal-lattice codes. Motivated by this, we tailor 3D topological codes for enhanced storage performance under biased Pauli noise. We present Clifford deformations of various 3D topological codes, such that they exhibit a threshold error rate of 50% under infinitely biased Pauli noise. Our examples include the 3D surface code on the cubic lattice, the 3D surface code on a checkerboard lattice that lends itself to a subsystem code with a single-shot decoder, and the 3D color code, as well as fracton models such as the X-cube model, the Sierpiński model, and the Haah code. We use the belief propagation with ordered statistics decoder (BP OSD) to study threshold error rates at finite bias. We also present a rotated layout for the 3D surface code, which uses roughly half the number of physical qubits for the same code distance under appropriate boundary conditions. Imposing coprime periodic dimensions on this rotated layout leads to logical operators of weight O(n) at infinite bias and a corresponding exp[−O(n)] subthreshold scaling of the logical failure rate, where n is the number of physical qubits in the code. Even though this scaling is unstable due to the existence of logical representations with O(1) low-rate and O(n2/3) high-rate Pauli errors, the number of such representations scales only polynomially for the Clifford-deformed code, leading to an enhanced effective distance.