Three-dimensional surface codes: Transversal gates and fault-tolerant architectures

TL;DR

This paper explores three-dimensional surface codes for quantum computing, demonstrating transversal gates and fault-tolerant architectures that eliminate the need for magic state distillation, unlike traditional 2D codes.

Contribution

It introduces a visualization method for 3D surface codes, proves certain gates are transversal, extends lattice surgery techniques to 3D, and proposes new fault-tolerant quantum architectures without magic state distillation.

Findings

CZ and CCZ gates are transversal in 3D surface codes

Proposed architectures do not require magic state distillation

Stacking three 3D surface codes can form a 3D color code

Abstract

One of the leading quantum computing architectures is based on the two-dimensional (2D) surface code. This code has many advantageous properties such as a high error threshold and a planar layout of physical qubits where each physical qubit need only interact with its nearest neighbours. However, the transversal logical gates available in 2D surface codes are limited. This means that an additional (resource intensive) procedure known as magic state distillation is required to do universal quantum computing with 2D surface codes. Here, we examine three-dimensional (3D) surface codes in the context of quantum computation. We introduce a picture for visualizing 3D surface codes which is useful for analysing stacks of three 3D surface codes. We use this picture to prove that the $CZ$ and $CCZ$ gates are transversal in 3D surface codes. We also generalize the techniques of 2D surface code lattice surgery to 3D surface codes. We combine these results and propose two quantum computing architectures based on 3D surface codes. Magic state distillation is not required in either of our architectures. Finally, we show that a stack of three 3D surface codes can be transformed into a single 3D color code (another type of quantum error-correcting code) using code concatenation.