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Paper 1

No More Hooks in the Surface Code: Distance-Preserving Syndrome Extraction for Arbitrary Layouts at Minimum Depth

Yuga Hirai, Shota Ikari, Yosuke Ueno, Yasunari Suzuki

Year

2026

Journal

arXiv preprint

DOI

arXiv:2603.01628

arXiv

2603.01628

Hook errors are a major challenge in implementing logical operations with the surface code, because they can reduce the fault distance below the code distance. This motivates syndrome-extraction circuits that suppress hook-error effects for the stabilizer layouts that appear during logical operations. However, the existing methods either increase circuit depth or require simultaneous execution of measurements and CNOT gates, both of which introduce additional overheads and degrade the threshold. We propose the ZX interleaving syndrome extraction, which preserves the full fault distance $d$ for any surface-code layout with regular stabilizer tiles at minimum depth, i.e., four layers of CNOT gates, without requiring additional circuit depth or simultaneous execution of measurements and CNOT gates. The key idea is to interleave the Z and X stabilizer tiles so that hook-error edges in the decoding graph are shortened and effectively eliminated. Numerical simulations under uniform depolarizing noise for memory and lattice-surgery experiments confirm that the proposed method achieves a full fault distance of $d$, whereas the best existing minimum-depth approach achieves $d-1$. Since the full fault distance is achievable for any regular tiling layout of the surface code, the proposed method may serve as an indispensable technique for practical fault-tolerant quantum computation.

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Paper 2

Tradeoffs on the volume of fault-tolerant circuits

Anirudh Krishna, Gilles Zémor

Year

2025

Journal

arXiv preprint

DOI

arXiv:2510.03057

arXiv

2510.03057

Dating back to the seminal work of von Neumann [von Neumann, Automata Studies, 1956], it is known that error correcting codes can overcome faulty circuit components to enable robust computation. Choosing an appropriate code is non-trivial as it must balance several requirements. Increasing the rate of the code reduces the relative number of redundant bits used in the fault-tolerant circuit, while increasing the distance of the code ensures robustness against faults. If the rate and distance were the only concerns, we could use asymptotically optimal codes as is done in communication settings. However, choosing a code for computation is challenging due to an additional requirement: The code needs to facilitate accessibility of encoded information to enable computation on encoded data. This seems to conflict with having large rate and distance. We prove that this is indeed the case, namely that a code family cannot simultaneously have constant rate, growing distance and short-depth gadgets to perform encoded CNOT gates. As a consequence, achieving good rate and distance may necessarily entail accepting very deep circuits, an undesirable trade-off in certain architectures and applications.

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