TopoLS: Lattice Surgery Compilation via Topological Program Transformations

TL;DR

TopoLS is a topology-centric compiler for lattice surgery in quantum computing that optimizes space-time volume using ZX diagrams and program transformations, outperforming prior circuit-centric methods.

Contribution

It introduces a novel topology-aware compilation approach combining ZX diagram transformations with MCTS-based synthesis for efficient lattice surgery layout optimization.

Findings

Achieves 46% average reduction in space--time volume over prior compilers.

Demonstrates strong scalability on large benchmark circuits.

Outperforms SAT-based methods in larger problem instances.

Abstract

Lattice surgery is a leading approach for implementing fault-tolerant logical operations in surface code quantum computing, but compiling efficient lattice surgery layouts remains challenging. Existing compilers are largely circuit-centric and operate directly on gate sequences, limiting their ability to exploit the topological flexibility of merge-split operations and minimize space--time volume. We present TopoLS, a topology-centric compiler that uses ZX diagrams as an intermediate representation for lattice surgery compilation. TopoLS combines semantic-preserving ZX-level program transformations, including spider fusion and topology-aware slicing, with a Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS)-based synthesis procedure that constructs pipe-diagram embeddings by jointly optimizing placement and routing in 3D space--time. To scale to large circuits, TopoLS further introduces topology-aware partitioning that decomposes the compilation task into bounded subproblems and limits the routing frontier during embedding. Across evaluated benchmarks, TopoLS achieves an average $46\%$ reduction in space--time volume over prior circuit-centric compilers, with improvements ranging from $25\%$ to $90\%$, and exhibits strong empirical scalability on large benchmark families. Compared with SAT-based formulations that become intractable on larger instances, TopoLS offers a practical end-to-end solution for optimized lattice surgery compilation. TopoLS has been integrated into the TQEC ecosystem, enabling downstream circuit-level simulation and resource estimation workflows.