No Arabic abstract
State distillation is the process of taking a number of imperfect copies of a particular quantum state and producing fewer better copies. Until recently, the lowest overhead method of distilling states |A>=(|0>+e^{ipi/4}|1>)/sqrt{2} produced a single improved |A> state given 15 input copies. New block code state distillation methods can produce k improved |A> states given 3k+8 input copies, potentially significantly reducing the overhead associated with state distillation. We construct an explicit surface code implementation of block code state distillation and quantitatively compare the overhead of this approach to the old. We find that, using the best available techniques, for parameters of practical interest, block code state distillation does not always lead to lower overhead, and, when it does, the overhead reduction is typically less than a factor of three.
Quantum computers capable of solving classically intractable problems are under construction, and intermediate-scale devices are approaching completion. Current efforts to design large-scale devices require allocating immense resources to error correction, with the majority dedicated to the production of high-fidelity ancillary states known as magic-states. Leading techniques focus on dedicating a large, contiguous region of the processor as a single magic-state distillation factory responsible for meeting the magic-state demands of applications. In this work we design and analyze a set of optimized factory architectural layouts that divide a single factory into spatially distributed factories located throughout the processor. We find that distributed factory architectures minimize the space-time volume overhead imposed by distillation. Additionally, we find that the number of distributed components in each optimal configuration is sensitive to application characteristics and underlying physical device error rates. More specifically, we find that the rate at which T-gates are demanded by an application has a significant impact on the optimal distillation architecture. We develop an optimization procedure that discovers the optimal number of factory distillation rounds and number of output magic states per factory, as well as an overall system architecture that interacts with the factories. This yields between a 10x and 20x resource reduction compared to commonly accepted single factory designs. Performance is analyzed across representative application classes such as quantum simulation and quantum chemistry.
Quantum communication typically involves a linear chain of repeater stations, each capable of reliable local quantum computation and connected to their nearest neighbors by unreliable communication links. The communication rate in existing protocols is low as two-way classical communication is used. We show that, if Bell pairs are generated between neighboring stations with a probability of heralded success greater than 0.65 and fidelity greater than 0.96, two-way classical communication can be entirely avoided and quantum information can be sent over arbitrary distances with arbitrarily low error at a rate limited only by the local gate speed. The number of qubits per repeater scales logarithmically with the communication distance. If the probability of heralded success is less than 0.65 and Bell pairs between neighboring stations with fidelity no less than 0.92 are generated only every T_B seconds, the logarithmic resource scaling remains and the communication rate through N links is proportional to 1/(T_B log^2 N).
Performing large calculations with a quantum computer will likely require a fault-tolerant architecture based on quantum error-correcting codes. The challenge is to design practical quantum error-correcting codes that perform well against realistic noise using modest resources. Here we show that a variant of the surface code -- the XZZX code -- offers remarkable performance for fault-tolerant quantum computation. The error threshold of this code matches what can be achieved with random codes (hashing) for every single-qubit Pauli noise channel; it is the first explicit code shown to have this universal property. We present numerical evidence that the threshold even exceeds this hashing bound for an experimentally relevant range of noise parameters. Focusing on the common situation where qubit dephasing is the dominant noise, we show that this code has a practical, high-performance decoder and surpasses all previously known thresholds in the realistic setting where syndrome measurements are unreliable. We go on to demonstrate the favourable sub-threshold resource scaling that can be obtained by specialising a code to exploit structure in the noise. We show that it is possible to maintain all of these advantages when we perform fault-tolerant quantum computation.
Resource consumption of the conventional surface code is expensive, in part due to the need to separate the defects that create the logical qubit far apart on the physical qubit lattice. We propose that instantiating the deformation-based surface code using superstabilizers makes it possible to detect short error chains connecting the superstabilizers, allowing us to place logical qubits close together. Additionally, we demonstrate the process of conversion from the defect-based surface code, which works as arbitrary state injection, and a lattice surgery-like CNOT gate implementation that requires fewer physical qubits than the braiding CNOT gate. Finally we propose a placement design for the deformation-based surface code and analyze its resource consumption; large scale quantum computation requires $frac{25}{4}d^2 +5d + 1$ physical qubits per logical qubit where $d$ is the code distance, whereas the planar code requires $16d^2 -16d + 4$ physical qubits per logical qubit, for a reduction of about 55%.
The surface code is highly practical, enabling arbitrarily reliable quantum computation given a 2-D nearest-neighbor coupled array of qubits with gate error rates below approximately 1%. We describe an open source library, Polyestimate, enabling a user with no knowledge of the surface code to specify realistic physical quantum gate error models and obtain logical error rate estimates. Functions allowing the user to specify simple depolarizing error rates for each gate have also been included. Every effort has been made to make this library user-friendly.