ArXiv · 2026
We study a frustrated seam produced by literal reflection gluing of Wen's plaquette model on a closed lattice Klein bottle. The seam operators anticommute along two cycles for even circumference and one cycle of twice the length for odd circumference. Their algebra reduces to free Majorana rings, while the commuting bulk stabilizers constrain the allowed ring sectors. This bulk locking yields exact ground energies, excitation gaps and degeneracies, checked by phase-aware Pauli traces and finite-size diagonalization, including two 24-qubit energy predictions. The seam degeneracy is not topological: the single-site seam fields tested split it at second order. We contrast this obstructed gluing with consistent toric-code realizations. An edge register preserves the anyon labels; a Hadamard-dressed site register has colour-dependent seam transport, with ground-state degeneracy 2 or 4 for even circumference and a sign-frustrated exception at odd circumference. For the enumerated lattice isometries and sizes, we compute logical gates and distances, distinguishing abstract qubit relabelling from local hardware depth. Finally, on three 16- and 24-qubit lattices, chiral matter selects a holonomy doublet whose electric-field splitting follows two competing tunnelling routes. These matter results remain finite-size statements. The main result is the exact obstructed-seam solution with bulk sector locking; the register, gate and matter calculations delimit its relation to topological codes.
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