Excising dead components in the surface code using minimally invasive alterations: A performance study

TL;DR

This paper evaluates a minimally invasive scheme for removing dead components from the surface code in quantum computing, demonstrating its effectiveness through extensive simulations and automated check basis construction techniques.

Contribution

It introduces a minimally invasive alteration method for excising dead components in surface codes and provides automated techniques for constructing check bases from circuits.

Findings

State-of-the-art performance in simulations

Effective excision of dead components

Compatibility with measurement-based and CNOT circuits

Abstract

The physical implementation of a large-scale error-corrected quantum processor will necessarily need to mitigate the presence of defective (thereby "dead") physical components in its operation, for example, identified during bring-up of the device or detected in the middle of a computation. In the context of solid-state qubits, the quantum error correcting protocol operating in the presence of dead components should ideally (i) use the same native operation set as that without dead components, (ii) maximize salvaging of functional components, and (iii) use a consistent global operating schedule which optimizes logical qubit performance and is compatible with the control requirements of the system. The scheme proposed by Grans-Samuelsson et al. [Quantum 8, 1429 (2024)] satisfies all three of these criteria: it effectively excises (cuts out) dead components from the surface code using minimally invasive alterations (MIA). We conduct extensive numerical simulations of this proposal for the pairwise-measurement-based surface code protocol in the presence of dead components under circuit-level noise. To that end, we also describe techniques to automatically construct performant check (detector) bases directly from circuits without manual circuit annotation, which may be of independent interest. Both the MIA scheme and this automated check basis computation can be readily used with measurement-based as well as CNOT-based circuits, and the results presented here demonstrate state-of-the-art performance.