Characterizing Quantum Error Correction Performance of Radiation-induced Errors

TL;DR

This paper presents a computational model to evaluate how radiation-induced errors affect quantum error correction performance in superconducting quantum devices, considering mitigation strategies.

Contribution

It introduces a holistic, modular simulation framework for assessing radiation impacts on QEC codes and chip design mitigation strategies.

Findings

The model maps radiation effects to qubit error channels.

Performance metric quantifies QEC resilience to radiation.

Parameter sweeps identify effective mitigation strategies.

Abstract

Radiation impacts are a current challenge with computing on superconducting-based quantum devices because they can lead to widespread correlated errors across the device. Such errors can be problematic for quantum error correction (QEC) codes, which are generally designed to correct independent errors. To address this, we have developed a computational model to simulate the effects of radiation impacts on QEC performance. This is achieved by building from recently developed models of quasiparticle density, mapping radiation-induced qubit error rates onto a quantum error channel and simulation of a simple surface code. We also provide a performance metric to quantify the resilience of a QEC code to radiation impacts. Additionally, we sweep various parameters of chip design to test mitigation strategies for improved QEC performance. Our model approach is holistic, allowing for modular performance testing of error mitigation strategies and chip and code designs.