Hi all, Tomorrow's talk will be in HIT K51 at 5pm by Cyril Stark. Title and Abstract below. See you there! Roger --- Breaking degeneracies: a route towards a thermally stable version of the Toric Code? I will try to explain an idea which might render the Toric Code stable against thermal interactions - at least to some extent. A repetition of some of the Toric Code basics will be followed by an illustration of the problems that arise when you let the Toric Code interact with a thermal environment: the interaction causes thermal excitations in the system that may lead to errors in the quantum computation if they move around the torus. Subsequently, I will describe a research project which is targeted at the suppression of the free movement of the thermally excited states enabling error correction at the end of the computation.