ABSTRACT
Surface codes are the most promising candidates for fault-tolerant quantum computation. Single qudit errors are typically modeled as Pauli operators, to which general errors are converted via randomizing methods. In this Letter, we quantify remaining correlations after syndrome measurement for a qudit 2D surface code subject to non-Pauli errors via loops on the lattice, using percolation theory. Below the error correction threshold, remaining correlations are sparse and locally constrained. Syndromes for qudit surface codes are therefore efficiently samplable for non-Pauli errors, independent of the exact forms of the error and decoder.
ABSTRACT
Distributed quantum information processing is based on the transmission of quantum data over lossy channels between quantum processing nodes. These nodes may be separated by a few microns or on planetary scale distances, but transmission losses due to absorption and/or scattering in the channel are the major source of error for most distributed quantum information tasks. Of course, quantum error correction (QEC) and detection techniques can be used to mitigate such effects, but error detection approaches have severe performance limitations due to the signaling constraints between nodes, and so error correction approaches are preferable-assuming one has sufficient high quality local operations. Typically, performance comparisons between loss-mitigating codes assume one encoded qubit per photon. However, single photons can carry more than one qubit of information and so our focus in this Letter is to explore whether loss-based QEC codes utilizing quantum multiplexed photons are viable and advantageous, especially as photon loss results in more than one qubit of information being lost. We show that quantum multiplexing enables significant resource reduction, in terms of the number of single-photon sources, while at the same time maintaining (or even lowering) the number of 2-qubit gates required. Further, our multiplexing approach requires only conventional optical gates already necessary for the implementation of these codes.