Decoding Merged Color-Surface Codes and Finding Fault-Tolerant Clifford Circuits Using Solvers for Satisfiability Modulo Theories

Understand

Universal fault-tolerant quantum computers will require the use of efficient protocols to implement encoded operations necessary in the execution of algorithms.

• In this work, we show how solvers for satisfiability modulo theories (SMT solvers) can be used to automate the construction of Clifford circuits with certain fault-tolerance properties and we apply our techniques to a fault-tolerant magic-state-preparation protocol.
• Part of the protocol requires converting magic states encoded in the color code to magic states encoded in the surface code.
• Since the teleportation step involves decoding a color code merged with a surface code, we develop a decoding algorithm that is applicable to such codes.