No Arabic abstract
The surface code is designed to suppress errors in quantum computing hardware and currently offers the most believable pathway to large-scale quantum computation. The surface code requires a 2-D array of nearest-neighbor coupled qubits that are capable of implementing a universal set of gates with error rates below approximately 1%, requirements compatible with experimental reality. Consequently, a number of authors are attempting to squeeze additional performance out of the surface code. We describe an optimal complexity error suppression algorithm, parallelizable to O(1) given constant computing resources per unit area, and provide evidence that this algorithm exploits correlations in the error models of each gate in an asymptotically optimal manner.
Quantum computing can become scalable through error correction, but logical error rates only decrease with system size when physical errors are sufficiently uncorrelated. During computation, unused high energy levels of the qubits can become excited, creating leakage states that are long-lived and mobile. Particularly for superconducting transmon qubits, this leakage opens a path to errors that are correlated in space and time. Here, we report a reset protocol that returns a qubit to the ground state from all relevant higher level states. We test its performance with the bit-flip stabilizer code, a simplified version of the surface code for quantum error correction. We investigate the accumulation and dynamics of leakage during error correction. Using this protocol, we find lower rates of logical errors and an improved scaling and stability of error suppression with increasing qubit number. This demonstration provides a key step on the path towards scalable quantum computing.
Spin qubits in silicon quantum dots are one of the most promising building blocks for large scale quantum computers thanks to their high qubit density and compatibility with the existing semiconductor technologies. High fidelity single-qubit gates exceeding the threshold of error correction codes like the surface code have been demonstrated, while two-qubit gates have reached 98% fidelity and are improving rapidly. However, there are other types of error --- such as charge leakage and propagation --- that may occur in quantum dot arrays and which cannot be corrected by quantum error correction codes, making them potentially damaging even when their probability is small. We propose a surface code architecture for silicon quantum dot spin qubits that is robust against leakage errors by incorporating multi-electron mediator dots. Charge leakage in the qubit dots is transferred to the mediator dots via charge relaxation processes and then removed using charge reservoirs attached to the mediators. A stabiliser-check cycle, optimised for our hardware, then removes the correlations between the residual physical errors. Through simulations we obtain the surface code threshold for the charge leakage errors and show that in our architecture the damage due to charge leakage errors is reduced to a similar level to that of the usual depolarising gate noise. Spin leakage errors in our architecture are constrained to only ancilla qubits and can be removed during quantum error correction via reinitialisations of ancillae, which ensure the robustness of our architecture against spin leakage as well. Our use of an elongated mediator dots creates spaces throughout the quantum dot array for charge reservoirs, measuring devices and control gates, providing the scalability in the design.
The yield of physical qubits fabricated in the laboratory is much lower than that of classical transistors in production semiconductor fabrication. Actual implementations of quantum computers will be susceptible to loss in the form of physically faulty qubits. Though these physical faults must negatively affect the computation, we can deal with them by adapting error correction schemes. In this paper We have simulated statically placed single-fault lattices and lattices with randomly placed faults at functional qubit yields of 80%, 90% and 95%, showing practical performance of a defective surface code by employing actual circuit constructions and realistic errors on every gate, including identity gates. We extend Stace et al.s superplaquettes solution against dynamic losses for the surface code to handle static losses such as physically faulty qubits. The single-fault analysis shows that a static loss at the periphery of the lattice has less negative effect than a static loss at the center. The randomly-faulty analysis shows that 95% yield is good enough to build a large scale quantum computer. The local gate error rate threshold is $sim 0.3%$, and a code distance of seven suppresses the residual error rate below the original error rate at $p=0.1%$. 90% yield is also good enough when we discard badly fabricated quantum computation chips, while 80% yield does not show enough error suppression even when discarding 90% of the chips. We evaluated several metrics for predicting chip performance, and found that the average of the product of the number of data qubits and the cycle time of a stabilizer measurement of stabilizers gave the strongest correlation with post-correction residual error rates. Our analysis will help with selecting usable quantum computation chips from among the pool of all fabricated chips.
Topologically quantum error corrected logical gates are complex. Chains of errors can form in space and time and diagonally in spacetime. It is highly nontrivial to determine whether a given logical gate is free of low weight combinations of errors leading to failure. We report a new tool Nestcheck capable of analyzing an arbitrary topological computation and determining the minimum number of errors required to cause failure.
Topological quantum error correction codes are known to be able to tolerate arbitrary local errors given sufficient qubits. This includes correlated errors involving many local qubits. In this work, we quantify this level of tolerance, numerically studying the effects of many-qubit errors on the performance of the surface code. We find that if increasingly large area errors are at least moderately exponentially suppressed, arbitrarily reliable quantum computation can still be achieved with practical overhead. We furthermore quantify the effect of non-local two-qubit correlated errors, which would be expected in arrays of qubits coupled by a polynomially decaying interaction, and when using many-qubit coupling devices. We surprisingly find that the surface code is very robust to this class of errors, despite a provable lack of a threshold error rate when such errors are present.