Fault tolerant architectures for superconducting qubits

Understand

In this short review, I draw attention to new developments in the theory of fault tolerance in quantum computation that may give concrete direction to future work in the development of superconducting qubit systems.

• The basics of quantum error correction codes, which I will briefly review, have not significantly changed since their introduction fifteen years ago.
• But an interesting picture has emerged of an efficient use of these codes that may put fault tolerant operation within reach.
• It is now understood that two dimensional surface codes, close relatives of the original toric code of Kitaev, can be adapted to effectively perform logical gate operations in a very simple planar architecture, with error thresholds for fault tolerant operation simulated to be 0.75%.