Bounding the distance of quantum surface codes

Homological quantum codes (also called topological codes) are low density parity check error correcting codes that come from surfaces and higher dimension manifolds. Homological codes from surfaces, i.e., surface codes, have also been suggested as a possible way to construct stable quantum memory and fault-tolerant computation. It has been conjectured that all homological codes have a square root bound on there distance and therefore cannot produce good codes. This claim has been disputed in dimension four using the geometric property of systolic freedom. We will show in this paper that the conjecture holds in dimension two due to the negation of systolic freedom, i.e., systolic rigidity.