The overhead of fault-tolerant quantum computing

Todd A. Brun

Hengyun Zhou, Madelyn Cain, Mikhail D. Lukin

Qian Xu, J. Pablo Bonilla Ataides, Christopher A. Pattison +7 more

Matthias Christandl, Omar Fawzi, Ashutosh Goswami

Fault-tolerant quantum computation traditionally incurs substantial resource overhead, with both qubit and time overheads scaling polylogarithmically with the size of the computation. While prior work by Gottesman showed that constant qubit overhead is achievable under stochastic noise using quantum low-density parity-check (QLDPC) codes, it has remained an open question whether similar guarantees hold under more general, non-stochastic noise models. In this work, we address this question by considering a general circuit-level noise model defined via the diamond norm, which captures both stochastic and non-stochastic noise, including coherent and amplitude damping noise. We prove that constant qubit overhead fault-tolerant quantum computation is achievable in this general setting, using QLDPC codes with constant rate and linear minimum distance. To establish our result, we develop a fault-tolerant error correction scheme and a method for implementing logic gates under general circuit noise. These results extend the theoretical foundations of fault-tolerant quantum computation and offer new directions for fault-tolerant architectures under realistic noise models.

I. S. Osborne

Hayata Yamasaki, Masato Koashi

Abstract Scalable realization of quantum computing to attain substantial speedups over classical computing requires fault tolerance. Conventionally, protocols for fault-tolerant quantum computation (FTQC) demand excessive space overhead of physical qubits per logical qubit. A more recent protocol to achieve constant-space-overhead FTQC using quantum low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes thus attracts considerable attention but suffers from another drawback: it incurs polynomially long time overhead. To address these problems, we here introduce an alternative approach using a concatenation of multiple small-size quantum codes for the constant-space-overhead FTQC rather than a single large-size quantum LDPC code. We develop techniques for concatenating different quantum Hamming codes with growing sizes. As a result, we construct a low-overhead protocol to achieve constant space overhead and only quasi-polylogarithmic time overhead simultaneously. Our protocol accomplishes FTQC even if a decoder has non-constant runtime, unlike the existing constant-space-overhead protocol. These results establish a foundation for FTQC realizing a large class of quantum speedups within feasibly bounded space overhead yet negligibly short time overhead. This achievement opens a promising avenue for the low-overhead FTQC based on code concatenation.