Defect-Adaptive Lattice Surgery on Irregular Boundary Surface-Code Patches

TL;DR

This paper introduces a defect-adaptive lattice-surgery method for surface-code patches with irregular boundaries, enabling fault-tolerant logical operations on imperfect hardware.

Contribution

It formulates a new seam-boundary defect problem and provides a synthesis-based solution for executable logical parity extraction on irregular patches.

Findings

Improved compile yield for lattice-surgery merges.

Preserved effective code distance despite defects.

Validated approach with circuit-level samples showing modest error overhead.

Abstract

Defect-adaptive surface-code methods have substantially advanced the construction of valid logical patches on imperfect hardware, but fault-tolerant computation also requires executable logical oper ations on the resulting irregular geometries. We formulate the seam-boundary defect problem: how to perform a lattice-surgery merge when the intended seam intersects deformed boundaries, disabled checks, and gauge-inferred super-stabilizers. We introduce a defect-adaptive lattice-surgery method that reconstructs the target joint logical parity from the seam-related measurements available on the irregular merged patch, together with constraints inherited from the separated pre-merge code space. The reconstruction is expressed as a compact GF(2) binary-support synthesis problem. If the requested parity is realizable, the solution gives an executable parity-extraction rule over raw, schedule-tagged gauge outcomes; otherwise, it certifies a parity-synthesis failure rather than conflat ing it with patch invalidity. The framework accommodates boundary data-qubit defects, seam-check ancilla defects, and gauge-inferred seam super-checks within a single synthesis layer. Circuit-level samples of the synthesized merge operation show improved compile yield, preserved effective dis tance, and only modest success-conditioned logical-error overhead relative to the defect-free merge reference; an explicit ZZ-merge sampling check confirms the expected transposed-geometry behav ior under the same success-conditioned observable construction. More broadly, the results identify certified parity synthesis as a compilation layer between defect-adaptive patch construction and executable fault-tolerant logical operations on imperfect surface-code hardware.