Fight or Flight: Cosmic Ray-Induced Phonons and the Quantum Surface Code

Understand

Recent work has identified cosmic ray events as an error source limiting the lifetime of quantum data.

• These errors are correlated and affect a large number of qubits, leading to the loss of data across a quantum chip.
• Previous works attempting to address the problem in hardware or by building distributed systems still have limitations.
• We approach the problem from a different perspective, developing a new hybrid hardware-software-based strategy based on the 2-D surface code, assuming the parallel development of a hardware strategy that limits the phonon propagation radius.