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Linear optical fusion-based quantum computation with multi-way fusions

Sara Bartolucci

Published Jun 19, 2025• 0 citations

Abstract

The realisation of a fault-tolerant universal quantum computer requires the ability to implement and control large scale quantum systems while maintaining physical noise levels sufficiently low to avoid errors in the computation. Fusion-Based Quantum Computation (FBQC) – a framework in which entangling fusion measurements are performed between constant-size entangled resource states – has emerged as a promising approach to achieve this, especially in the context of Linear Optical Quantum Computing (LOQC). Most FBQC schemes proposed so far use physical fusions between two qubits. In this thesis, we study the impact of using multi-way fusions, which act on more physical qubits simultaneously, on the error tolerance and resource overhead of linear optical FBQC architectures. The main challenge of LOQC is that entangling operations are inherently non-deterministic, leading to large resource overheads. The success probability is known to decrease exponentially with the number of input qubits. We introduce novel fusion circuits which succeed at higher rates and/or entangle subsets of inputs upon failure. We present a framework to analyse the impact of noise on these circuits and describe the resulting errors as effective Pauli error channels on the input qubits. We also examine the application of multi-way fusion circuits within a linear optical FBQC architecture. We find that they can be used to generate resource states with significantly reduced Pauli error rates and footprint compared to two-way fusions alone, in turn resulting in linear optical FBQC architectures with higher error tolerance and lower resource overheads. We also investigate their use as primitives of the computation, applied between different resource states, and find evidence that two-way fusions remain preferable in this context due to their lower erasure rate.

DOI: 10.25560/127288

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Fusion-based quantum computing is an attractive model for fault-tolerant computation based on photonics requiring only finite-sized entangled resource states followed by linear-optics operations and photon measurements. Large-scale implementations have so far been limited due to the access only to probabilistic photon sources, vulnerability to photon loss, and the need for massive multiplexing. Deterministic photon sources offer an alternative and resource-efficient route. By synergistically integrating deterministic photon emission, adaptive repeat-until-success fusions, and an optimised architectural design, we propose a complete blueprint for a photonic quantum computer using quantum dots and linear optics. It features time-bin qubit encoding, reconfigurable entangled-photon sources, and a fusion-based architecture with low optical connectivity, significantly reducing the required optical depth per photon and resource overheads. We present in detail the hardware required for resource-state generation and fusion networking, experimental pulse sequences, and exact resource estimates for preparing a logical qubit. We estimate that one logical clock cycle of error correction can be executed within microseconds, which scales linearly with the code distance. We also simulate error thresholds for fault-tolerance considering a full catalogue of intrinsic error sources found in real-world quantum dot devices. Our work establishes a practical blueprint for a low-optical-depth, emitter-based fault-tolerant photonic quantum computer.

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Many quantum operations are expected to exhibit bias in the structure of their errors. Recent works have shown that a fixed bias can be exploited to improve error tolerance by statically arranging the errors in beneficial configurations. In some cases an error bias can be dynamically reconfigurable, an example being linear optical fusion where the basis of a fusion failure can be chosen before the measurement is made. Here we introduce methods for increasing error tolerance in this setting by using classical decision-making to adaptively choose the bias in measurements as a fault tolerance protocol proceeds. We study this technique in the setting of linear optical fusion based quantum computing (FBQC). We provide examples demonstrating that by dynamically arranging erasures, the loss tolerance can be tripled when compared to a static arrangement of biased errors while using the same quantum resources: we show that for the best FBQC architecture of Bartolucci et al. (2023) the threshold increases from

2.7\%

to

7.5\%

per photon with the same resource state by using dynamic biasing. Our method does not require any specific code structure beyond having a syndrome graph representation. We have chosen to illustrate these techniques using an architecture which is otherwise identical to that in Bartolucci et al. (2023), but deployed together with other techniques, such as different fusion networks, higher loss thresholds are possible.

We introduce a construction for protocols for fault-tolerant quantum computing based on code concatenation and transversal gates. These protocols can be interpreted as families of quantum circuits of low-weight stabilizer measurements without strict locality constraints, effectively implementing concatenated codes. However, we primarily study these protocols in the context of photonic fusion-based quantum computing (FBQC), where they yield families of fusion networks with constant-sized resource states. Their high erasure thresholds relative to their resource-state cost establish them as promising candidates to replace surface codes in the context of FBQC. Examples include protocol families using 8-, 10- and 12-qubit resource states, with erasure thresholds of 13.8%, 19.1% and 11.5%, and footprint-per-logical-qubit scaling as

\mathcal{O}(d)

,

\mathcal{O}(d^{1.46})

and

\mathcal{O}(d^{0.58})

, respectively, where

d

is the code distance. We also present techniques for performing logical operations, decoding, and implementing the protocols in photonic hardware. Although we focus on photonic FBQC, these ideas may also be of interest in other settings.