Quantifying the effects of local many-qubit errors and non-local two-qubit errors on the surface code

Understand

Topological quantum error correction codes are known to be able to tolerate arbitrary local errors given sufficient qubits.

• This includes correlated errors involving many local qubits.
• In this work, we quantify this level of tolerance, numerically studying the effects of many-qubit errors on the performance of the surface code.
• We find that if increasingly large area errors are at least moderately exponentially suppressed, arbitrarily reliable quantum computation can still be achieved with practical overhead.