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Ding, Julian

Quantum computation presents a radical computational paradigm with many potential benefits over classical computation. Unfortunately, quantum information is prone to spontaneous degradation due to limitations in current quantum hardware. The performance of near-future quantum hardware therefore stands to be drastically improved by using fault-tolerant encodings of qubits that can restore information scrambled by noise processes in real time. One such error-correcting code with a convenient square-lattice geometry is the Kitaev surface code. We design a numerical model for simulating error correction on planar surface codes using the minimum-weight perfect matching algorithm: a polynomial-time classical algorithm that determines the best error-correcting operations using a probabilistic error model. We then investigate the performance of the planar code under an augmented simulation modelling a specific photonic implementation of the qubit lattice. In this model, measurement failure presents a source of local errors, resulting in a non-uniform error model. We determine the maximum tolerance of the minimum-weight perfect matching error correction procedure to errors due to both uniform noise and measurement failure as a transition in their 2D parameter space, and investigate the improvement afforded by incorporating information about the measurement failures in the error model. Ultimately, we find that the error threshold is significantly higher when using this heralded error model when measurement failure rates are high.

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University of British Columbia. PHYS 449

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0415052

Science, Faculty of; Physics and Astronomy, Department of

Undergraduate

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