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Paper 1

Logical Error Rate Scaling of the Toric Code

Fern H. E. Watson, Sean D. Barrett

Year

2013

Journal

arXiv preprint

DOI

arXiv:1312.5213

arXiv

1312.5213

To date, a great deal of attention has focused on characterizing the performance of quantum error correcting codes via their thresholds, the maximum correctable physical error rate for a given noise model and decoding strategy. Practical quantum computers will necessarily operate below these thresholds meaning that other performance indicators become important. In this work we consider the scaling of the logical error rate of the toric code and demonstrate how, in turn, this may be used to calculate a key performance indicator. We use a perfect matching decoding algorithm to find the scaling of the logical error rate and find two distinct operating regimes. The first regime admits a universal scaling analysis due to a mapping to a statistical physics model. The second regime characterizes the behavior in the limit of small physical error rate and can be understood by counting the error configurations leading to the failure of the decoder. We present a conjecture for the ranges of validity of these two regimes and use them to quantify the overhead -- the total number of physical qubits required to perform error correction.

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Paper 2

Efficient magic state cultivation with lattice surgery

Yutaka Hirano, Riki Toshio, Tomohiro Itogawa, Keisuke Fujii

Year

2025

Journal

arXiv preprint

DOI

arXiv:2510.24615

arXiv

2510.24615

Magic state distillation plays a crucial role in fault-tolerant quantum computation and represents a major bottleneck. In contrast to traditional logical-level distillation, physical-level distillation offers significant overhead reduction by enabling direct implementation with physical gates. Magic state cultivation is a state-of-the-art physical-level distillation protocol that is compatible with the square-grid connectivity and yields high-fidelity magic states. However, it relies on the complex grafted code, which incurs substantial spacetime overhead and complicates practical implementation. In this work, we propose an efficient cultivation-based protocol compatible with the square-grid connectivity. We reduce the spatial overhead by avoiding the grafted code and further reduce the average spacetime overhead by utilizing code expansion and enabling early rejection. Numerical simulations show that, with a color code distance of 3 and a physical error probability of $10^{-3}$, our protocol achieves a logical error probability for the resulting magic state comparable to that of magic state cultivation ($\approx 3 \times 10^{-6}$), while requiring about half the spacetime overhead. Our work provides an efficient and simple distillation protocol suitable for megaquop use cases and early fault-tolerant devices.

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