Fault-tolerant error correction with the gauge color code

• Published in: Nature communications Vol. 7; no. 1; p. 12302
• Main Authors: Brown, Benjamin J., Nickerson, Naomi H., Browne, Dan E.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 29-07-2016; Nature Publishing Group; Nature Portfolio
• Subjects: 639/705/258; 639/766/483/481; Codes; Error correction & detection; Humanities and Social Sciences; multidisciplinary; Proposals; Quantum computing; Science; Science (multidisciplinary); Spacetime; United Kingdom > UK
• ISSN: 2041-1723; 2041-1723
• DOI: 10.1038/ncomms12302

The constituent parts of a quantum computer are inherently vulnerable to errors. To this end, we have developed quantum error-correcting codes to protect quantum information from noise. However, discovering codes that are capable of a universal set of computational operations with the minimal cost in quantum resources remains an important and ongoing challenge. One proposal of significant recent interest is the gauge color code. Notably, this code may offer a reduced resource cost over other well-studied fault-tolerant architectures by using a new method, known as gauge fixing, for performing the non-Clifford operations that are essential for universal quantum computation. Here we examine the gauge color code when it is subject to noise. Specifically, we make use of single-shot error correction to develop a simple decoding algorithm for the gauge color code, and we numerically analyse its performance. Remarkably, we find threshold error rates comparable to those of other leading proposals. Our results thus provide the first steps of a comparative study between the gauge color code and other promising computational architectures.
Construction of a scalable quantum computer requires error-correcting codes to overcome the errors introduced by noise. Here, the authors develop a decoding algorithm for the gauge color code, and obtain its threshold values when physical errors and measurement faults are included.