No Arabic abstract
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.
Phosphorus donor spins in silicon offer a number of promising characteristics for the implementation of robust qubits. Amongst various concepts for scale-up, the shared-control concept takes advantage of 3D scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) fabrication techniques to minimise the number of control lines, allowing the donors to be placed at the pitch limit of $geq$30 nm, enabling dipole interactions. A fundamental challenge is to exploit the faster exchange interaction, however, the donor spacings required are typically 15 nm or less, and the exchange interaction is notoriously sensitive to lattice site variations in donor placement. This work presents a proposal for a fast exchange-based surface-code quantum computer architecture which explicitly addresses both donor placement imprecision commensurate with the atomic-precision fabrication techniques and the stringent qubit pitch requirements. The effective pitch is extended by incorporation of an intermediate donor acting as an exchange-interaction switch. We consider both global control schemes and a scheduled series of operations by designing GRAPE pulses for individual CNOTs based on coupling scenarios predicted by atomistic tight-binding simulations. The architecture is compatible with the existing fabrication capabilities and may serve as a blueprint for the experimental implementation of a full-scale fault-tolerant quantum computer based on donor impurities in silicon.
Leakage outside of the qubit computational subspace, present in many leading experimental platforms, constitutes a threatening error for quantum error correction (QEC) for qubits. We develop a leakage-detection scheme via Hidden Markov models (HMMs) for transmon-based implementations of the surface code. By performing realistic density-matrix simulations of the distance-3 surface code (Surface-17), we observe that leakage is sharply projected and leads to an increase in the surface-code defect probability of neighboring stabilizers. Together with the analog readout of the ancilla qubits, this increase enables the accurate detection of the time and location of leakage. We restore the logical error rate below the memory break-even point by post-selecting out leakage, discarding about 47% of the data. Leakage detection via HMMs opens the prospect for near-term QEC demonstrations, targeted leakage reduction and leakage-aware decoding and is applicable to other experimental platforms.
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.
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.
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.