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arXiv:2607.24907

Fault-tolerant distributed quantum computing with a single nucleus per node

Yotam Vaknin, Shoham Jaocby, Roi Nevo, Aleksander Kubica, Alex Retzker

quant-phSubmitted Jul 27, 2026• Announced Jul 29, 2026• 0 citations
v1 · Jul 27, 2026v2 · Jul 29, 2026
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Abstract

Distributed quantum computing interconnects small, high-quality nodes through optical links, but this architecture carries a pronounced asymmetry: in-node gates and measurements are cheap and high-fidelity, whereas inter-node communication relies on a low-coherence communication qubit and faulty photonics. Previous approaches overcame the noisy link by placing several high-quality data qubits in each node and consuming them for Bell pair and GHZ state distillation. Here we show that distillation can be avoided altogether. The key observation is that we can engineer a communication error bias, where photonic Bell pairs suffer frequent phase errors but only rare bit-flip errors. We design the syndrome-extraction circuits so that this phase noise appears solely as a measurement error that does not propagate to the data qubits, and is therefore suppressed by simply repeating the measurement; letting the error-correcting code itself, rather than a dedicated distillation subroutine, to purify the link. This dramatically reduces the need for ancillary nuclei: Floquet codes require only a single data qubit per node, while general stabilizer codes require just one additional ancilla. We demonstrate high error-correction thresholds throughout this regime, and we identify lattice surgery as inherently robust for this setting, enabling logical operations at a threshold close to that of quantum memory. As a result, the performance of the quantum computer is limited by the high-quality data qubits, while the requirements on photon indistinguishability and coherence of the communication qubit are substantially relaxed.

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Distributed quantum computing interconnects small, high-quality nodes through optical links, but this architecture carries a pronounced asymmetry: in-node gates and measurements are cheap and high-fidelity, whereas inter-node communication relies on a low-coherence communication qubit and faulty photonics. Previous approaches overcame the noisy link by placing several high-quality data qubits in each node and consuming them for Bell pair and GHZ state distillation. Here we show that distillation can be avoided altogether. The key observation is that we can engineer a communication error bias, where photonic Bell pairs suffer frequent phase errors but only rare bit-flip errors. We design the syndrome-extraction circuits so that this phase noise appears solely as a measurement error that does not propagate to the data qubits, and is therefore suppressed by simply repeating the measurement; letting the error-correcting code itself, rather than a dedicated distillation subroutine, to purify the link. This dramatically reduces the need for ancillary nuclei: Floquet codes require only a single data qubit per node, while general stabilizer codes require just one additional ancilla. We demonstrate high error-correction thresholds throughout this regime, and we identify lattice surgery as inherently robust for this setting, enabling logical operations at a threshold close to that of quantum memory. As a result, the performance of the quantum computer is limited by the high-quality data qubits, while the requirements on photon indistinguishability and coherence of the communication qubit are substantially relaxed.
Distributed architectures have been proposed as a pathway to large-scale quantum computers. Combined with the need for fault-tolerance, such architectures require distributed quantum error correction (DQEC) and distributed logical gates. An important challenge is how to realize DQEC primitives in the setting where interaction between modules is restricted to shared Bell pairs that are significantly noisier than on-chip operations. We extend the framework known as fault tolerance by construction to this setting, deriving different strategies for handling the additional noise. Through fault-improvement we recover conventional entanglement distillation, and also find more dynamical protocols that enable space-time trade-offs. We show that integrated decoding halves the required distillation code distance compared to entanglement distillation implemented using separate decoding, thus requiring significantly fewer Bell pairs. As a main focus of the work, we synthesize efficient circuits for an important primitive in distributed fault tolerance: distributed stabilizer measurements. These circuits can be adapted to resource constraints, e.g. on the Bell pair generation rate or the space available for on-chip auxiliary qubits. Noting that full local fault-tolerance is not always needed to preserve the correct scaling of logical error rates, we further optimize the circuits depending on the surrounding context. We consider in particular the surface code and the color code, both as distributed memories and in the case of lattice surgery across separate modules. Here, robustness to certain hook and readout errors reduces the number of required Bell pairs even further, compared to the context-free setting. We numerically benchmark the resulting implementations under circuit level noise with additional interconnect noise.
Distributed quantum computing requires fault-tolerant operations across inter-QPU links that can be substantially noisier than local gates. Uniformly increasing code distance provides additional protection but also enlarges data patches used for local storage and computation. Here, we introduce distributed heterogeneous-distance lattice surgery using an eight-data-patch ancilla-mediated (8-DAM) architecture, which will be useful for near-term quantum devices with less qubit overhead. In this architecture, the central ancilla spanning the inter-QPU boundary is enlarged while the data patches retain distance ddd. The protocol uses traveling stabilizers to suppress hook errors during merge and split operations between these unequal-distance patches. Circuit-level simulations of rotated surface codes at fixed local depolarizing noise show that logical-readout error rates depend only weakly on link noise. The resulting advantage over conventional lattice surgery grows as link errors increase. Comparisons with uniform distance implementations demonstrate comparable logical error suppression with reduced physical-qubit overhead. We also demonstrate how 8-DAM layouts support two simultaneous distributed logical CNOT operations between four logical data qubits using a single enlarged ancilla. At higher link noise, this construction yields lower logical error rates and more stability than two independent distributed logical CNOTs. These results support selective ancilla enlargement as a resource-efficient approach to fault-tolerant distributed quantum computing.
Distributed quantum computing can potentially address the scalability challenge by networking processors through photon-mediated remote entanglement. Prior approaches assumed that remote Bell pairs require distillation before use, incurring substantial overhead, to achieve sufficiently high fidelity. However, recent results show that lattice-surgery operations at logical qubit boundaries tolerate significantly higher error rates than previously assumed. We quantify the resource trade-offs between distillation overhead and surface-code distance requirements under realistic constraints including probabilistic entanglement generation and memory decoherence. We identify the fidelity crossover point separating the two regimes. Below this threshold, the distillation strategy dominates, reducing resource overhead by up to two orders of magnitude. Above it, no-distillation becomes the more efficient choice, reducing resource overhead by more than half. We briefly describe the application of these methods to ion-trap and neutral-atom platforms. These results provide joint design guidelines for optimizing photonic interconnects and fault-tolerant architectures in distributed quantum computing.
Building fault-tolerant quantum computers with large numbers of logical qubits requires both scalable hardware architectures and error-correcting codes that make efficient use of physical qubits. Photonic interconnects address both of these challenges by allowing the physical qubits to be distributed across multiple processors while providing the non-local connectivity necessary to implement resource-efficient codes such as high-rate quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes. A key requirement for realising this architecture is the ability to perform stabiliser measurements between remote processors, which has not previously been demonstrated experimentally. Here we report the first experimental demonstration of distributed quantum error detection and correction. We generate entanglement between network qubits in two separate trapped-ion processors and use it to perform remote syndrome measurements on data qubits. We first realise a distributed [[2, 1, 1]] repetition code, detecting phase-flip errors on a logical qubit encoded across the two modules in real time and suppressing logical errors. We then combine these mid-circuit syndrome measurements with real-time feedforward to actively correct arbitrary single-qubit Pauli errors on a distributed Bell state. These results provide an experimental foundation for quantum error correction (QEC) across modular quantum architectures.
Physical constraints and engineering challenges, including wafer dimensions, classical control cabling, and refrigeration volumes, impose significant limitations on the scalability of quantum computing units. As a result, a modular quantum computing architecture, comprising small processors interconnected by quantum links, is emerging as a promising approach to fault-tolerant quantum computing. However, the requirements that the network must fulfill to enable distributed quantum computation remain largely unexplored. We consider an architecture tailored for qubits with nearest-neighbor physical connectivity, leveraging the surface code for error correction and enabling fault-tolerant operations through lattice surgery and magic state distillation. We propose measurement teleportation as a tool to extend lattice surgery techniques to qubits located on different computing units interconnected via Bell pairs. Through memory simulations, we build an error model for logical operations and deduce an end-to-end resource estimation of Shor’s algorithm over a minimalist distributed architecture. Concretely, for a characteristic physical gate error rate of 10 − 3 , a processor cycle time of 1 µs, factoring a 2048-bit RSA integer is shown to be possible with 379 computing processors, each made with 89 781 qubits, with negligible space and time overhead with respect to a monolithic approach without parallelization, if 70 Bell pairs are available per cycle time between each processor with a fidelity exceeding 98.1 % .
Qubits with strongly biased noise, in which phase-flip errors are orders of magnitude more frequent than bit-flips, arise both naturally, as in electron and nuclear spins, and by engineering, as in stabilized cat qubits. This noise structure holds the promise of reducing the daunting hardware overhead of fault-tolerant quantum computing, but exploiting it requires physical operations that do not convert frequent phase-flips into rare bit-flips. In this review, we analyze the most prominent fault-tolerant protocols for biased-noise qubits, organized according to the available set of such bias-preserving operations. When this set is restricted to the CZ gate together with preparation and measurement in the X basis, we show that the complexity of the required syndrome extraction gadgets essentially cancels the benefit of the noise bias: at experimentally relevant error rates, one may as well ignore the bias and rely on standard error correction designed for depolarizing noise. The situation changes drastically when a bias-preserving CX gate is available: the hierarchy of errors can then be reflected in the structure of the code, with frequent phase-flips corrected by a dedicated high-threshold code and rare bit-flips by concatenation with a high-rate code. The same hierarchy also enables hardware-efficient preparation of magic states. Finally, as a bias-preserving CX is forbidden in naturally biased platforms and challenging in engineered ones, we present a measurement-based architecture in which a high-fidelity quantum non-demolition readout of multi-qubit Pauli Z operators takes its place, extending these overhead reductions to a much broader range of physical platforms.