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Paper 1

A new twist on the Majorana surface code: Bosonic and fermionic defects for fault-tolerant quantum computation

Campbell McLauchlan, Benjamin Béri

Year

2022

Journal

arXiv preprint

DOI

arXiv:2211.11777

arXiv

2211.11777

Majorana zero modes (MZMs) are promising candidates for topologically-protected quantum computing hardware, however their large-scale use will likely require quantum error correction. Majorana surface codes (MSCs) have been proposed to achieve this. However, many MSC properties remain unexplored. We present a unified framework for MSC "twist defects" $\unicode{x2013}$ anyon-like objects encoding quantum information. We show that twist defects in MSCs can encode twice the amount of topologically protected information as in qubit-based codes or other MSC encoding schemes. This is due to twists encoding both logical qubits and "logical MZMs," with the latter enhancing the protection microscopic MZMs can offer. We explain how to perform universal computation with logical qubits and logical MZMs while potentially using far fewer resources than in other MSC schemes. All Clifford gates can be implemented on logical qubits by braiding twist defects. We introduce lattice-surgery-based techniques for computing with logical MZMs and logical qubits, achieving the effect of Clifford gates with zero time overhead. We also show that logical MZMs may result in improved spatial overheads for sufficiently low rates of quasi-particle poisoning. Finally, we introduce a novel MSC analogue of transversal gates that achieves encoded Clifford gates in small codes by braiding microscopic MZMs. MSC twist defects thus open new paths towards fault-tolerant quantum computation.

Open paper

Paper 2

Estimating and decoding coherent errors of QEC experiments with detector error models

Evangelia Takou, Kenneth R. Brown

Year

2025

Journal

arXiv preprint

DOI

arXiv:2510.23797

arXiv

2510.23797

Decoders of quantum error correction (QEC) experiments make decisions based on detected errors and the expected rates of error events, which together comprise a detector error model. Here we show that the syndrome history of QEC experiments is sufficient to detect and estimate coherent errors, removing the need for prior device benchmarking experiments. Importantly, our method shows that experimentally determined detector error models work equally well for both stochastic and coherent noise regimes. We model fully-coherent or fully-stochastic noise for repetition and surface codes and for various phenomenological and circuit-level noise scenarios, by employing Majorana and Monte Carlo simulators. We capture the interference of coherent errors, which appears as enhanced or suppressed physical error rates compared to the stochastic case, and also observe hyperedges that do not appear in the corresponding Pauli-twirled models. Finally, we decode the detector error models undergoing coherent noise and find different thresholds compared to detector error models built based on the stochastic noise assumption.

Open paper