Qutrit toric code and parafermions in trapped ions

The development of programmable quantum devices can be measured by the complexity of many-body states that they are able to prepare. Among the most significant are topologically ordered states of matter, which enable robust quantum information storage and processing. While topological orders are more readily accessible with qudits, experimental realizations have thus far been limited to lattice models of qubits. Here, we prepare and measure a ground state of the $${{\mathbb{Z}}}_{3}$$ Z 3 toric code state on 24 qutrits (obtained by encoding one qutrit into two qubits) in a trapped ion quantum processor with fidelity per qutrit exceeding 96.5(3)%. We manipulate two types of defects which go beyond the conventional qubit toric code: a parafermion, and its bound state which is related to charge conjugation symmetry. We further demonstrate defect fusion and the transfer of entanglement between anyons and defects, which we use to control topological qutrits. Our work opens up the space of long-range entangled states with qudit degrees of freedom for use in quantum simulation and universal error-correcting codes.