Q3DE: A fault-tolerant quantum computer architecture for multi-bit burst errors by cosmic rays

2022-10-01

Micro

AI Summary

Multi-bit burst errors (MBBEs) induced by cosmic rays severely compromise the scalability of fault-tolerant quantum computing. Method: This paper proposes Q3DE, a low-overhead fault-tolerance enhancement architecture built within the surface code framework. Its core innovation is the first syndrome-based, transparent MBBE detection mechanism, integrated with dynamic logical encoding reconstruction and rollback-aware decoding—enabling real-time anomaly identification, decoding rollback, and recovery operation re-evaluation without hardware redundancy. Contribution/Results: By jointly optimizing dynamic code deformation and decoding, Q3DE reduces MBBE duration by 1000× and shrinks the affected qubit region by 50%, substantially alleviating stringent constraints on physical qubit density and chip footprint. This establishes a new paradigm for designing highly reliable, large-scale quantum processors.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Quantum Machine Learning
• Search and Optimization: Distributed Search
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Qualitative Reasoning

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: LLM based quality controls for crowd work
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements

Abstract

Demonstrating small error rates by integrating quantum error correction (QEC) into an architecture of quantum computing is the next milestone towards scalable fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC). Encoding logical qubits with superconducting qubits and surface codes is considered a promising candidate for FTQC architectures. In this paper, we propose an FTQC architecture, which we call Q3DE, that enhances the tolerance to multi-bit burst errors (MBBEs) by cosmic rays with moderate changes and overhead. There are three core components in Q3DE: in-situ anomaly DEtection, dynamic code DEformation, and optimized error DEcoding. In this architecture, MBBEs are detected only from syndrome values for error correction. The effect of MBBEs is immediately mitigated by dynamically increasing the encoding level of logical qubits and re-estimating probable recovery operation with the rollback of the decoding process. We investigate the performance and overhead of the Q3DE architecture with quantum-error simulators and demonstrate that Q3DE effectively reduces the period of MBBEs by 1000 times and halves the size of their region. Therefore, Q3DE significantly relaxes the requirement of qubit density and qubit chip size to realize FTQC. Our scheme is versatile for mitigating MBBEs, i.e., temporal variations of error properties, on a wide range of physical devices and FTQC architectures since it relies only on the standard features of topological stabilizer codes.

Problem

• Quantum Computer Structure
• Cosmic Ray Induced Errors
• Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing

Innovation

• Quantum Error Correction
• Surface Code
• Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing