Alexander Cowtan, Zhiyang He, Dominic J. Williamson, Theodore J. Yoder (Oct 17 2025).
Abstract: Quantum code surgery is a promising technique to perform fault-tolerant computation on quantum low-density parity-check codes. Recent developments have significantly reduced the space overhead of surgery. However, generic surgery operations still require
O(d) rounds of repeated syndrome extraction to be made fault-tolerant. In this work, we focus on reducing the time overhead of surgery. We first present a general set of conditions that ensure fault-tolerant surgery operations can be performed with constant time overhead. This fast surgery necessarily makes use of an auxiliary complex described by a hypergraph rather than a graph. We then introduce a concrete scheme called block reading, which performs transversal surgery across multiple code blocks. We further investigate surgery operations with intermediate time overhead, between
O(1) and
O(d), which apply to quantum locally testable codes. Finally, we establish a circuit equivalence between homomorphic measurement and hypergraph surgery and derive bounds on the time overhead of generic logical measurement schemes. Overall, our results demonstrate that reducing the time cost of code surgery is not reliant on the quantum memory being single-shot. Instead it is chiefly the connectivity between a code and its measurement ancilla system that determines the achievable measurement time overhead.
