The battle of clean and dirty qubits in the era of partial error correction

Understand

When error correction becomes possible it will be necessary to dedicate a large number of physical qubits to each logical qubit.

• Error correction allows for deeper circuits to be run, but each additional physical qubit can potentially contribute an exponential increase in computational space, so there is a trade-off between using qubits for error correction or using them as noisy qubits.
• In this work we look at the effects of using noisy qubits in conjunction with noiseless qubits (an idealized model for error-corrected qubits), which we call the "clean and dirty" setup.
• We employ analytical models and numerical simulations to characterize this setup.