Krysta M. Svore

A critical milestone for quantum computers is to demonstrate fault-tolerant computation that outperforms computation on physical qubits. The tesseract subsystem color code protects four logical qubits in 16 physical qubits, to distance four. Using the tesseract code on Quantinuum's trapped-ion quantum computers, we prepare high-fidelity encoded graph states on up to 12 logical qubits, beneficially combining for the first time fault-tolerant error correction and computation. We also protect encoded states through up to five rounds of error correction. Using performant quantum software and hardware together allows moderate-depth logical quantum circuits to have an order of magnitude less error than the equivalent unencoded circuits.

We consider a model of quantum computation in which the set of operations is limited to nearest-neighbor interactions on a 2D lattice. We model movement of qubits with noisy SWAP operations. For this architecture we design a fault-tolerant coding scheme using the concatenated [[7,1,3]] Steane code. Our scheme is potentially applicable to ion-trap and solid-state quantum technologies. We calculate a lower bound on the noise threshold for our local model using a detailed failure probability analysis. We obtain a threshold of 1.85 x 10^-5 for the local setting, where memory error rates are one-tenth of the failure rates of gates, measurement, and preparation steps. For the analogous nonlocal setting, we obtain a noise threshold of 3.61 x 10^-5. Our results thus show that the additional SWAP operations required to move qubits in the local model affect the noise threshold only moderately.