Surf-Deformer: Mitigating Dynamic Defects on Surface Code via Adaptive Deformation

TL;DR

Surf-Deformer introduces an adaptive deformation framework for surface codes that significantly improves defect mitigation efficiency, reduces failure rates, and conserves qubit resources in quantum error correction.

Contribution

It presents a novel adaptive deformation method based on gauge transformations, enhancing defect mitigation and resource efficiency in surface code quantum error correction.

Findings

Reduces failure rates by 35x to 70x

Halves qubit resource requirements for same failure rate

Improves surface code communication throughput

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce Surf-Deformer, a code deformation framework that seamlessly integrates adaptive defect mitigation functionality into the current surface code workflow. It crafts several basic deformation instructions based on fundamental gauge transformations, which can be combined to explore a larger design space than previous methods. This enables more optimized deformation processes tailored to specific defect situations, restoring the QEC capability of deformed codes more efficiently with minimal qubit resources. Additionally, we design an adaptive code layout that accommodates our defect mitigation strategy while ensuring efficient execution of logical operations. Our evaluation shows that Surf-Deformer outperforms previous methods by significantly reducing the end-to-end failure rate of various quantum programs by 35x to 70x, while requiring only about 50% of the qubit resources compared to the previous method to achieve the same level of failure rate. Ablation studies show that Surf-Deformer surpasses previous defect removal methods in preserving QEC capability and facilitates surface code communication by achieving nearly optimal throughput.