Experimental fault-tolerant code switching

Understand

Quantum error correction is a crucial tool for mitigating hardware errors in quantum computers by encoding logical information into multiple physical qubits.

• However, no single error-correcting code allows for an intrinsically fault-tolerant implementation of all the gates needed for universal quantum computing [1-3].
• One way to tackle this problem is to switch between two suitable error-correcting codes, while preserving the encoded logical information, which in combination give access to a fault-tolerant universal gate set [4-6].
• In this work, we present the first experimental implementation of fault-tolerant code switching between two codes.