Fast universal logical gates on topologically encoded qubits at arbitrarily large code distances

Abstract

A fundamental question in the theory of quantum computation is to understand the ultimate space-time resource costs for performing a universal set of logical quantum gates to arbitrary precision. To date, all proposed schemes for implementing a universal logical gate set, such as magic state distillation or code switching, require a substantial space-time overhead, including a time overhead that necessarily diverges in the limit of vanishing logical error rate. Here we demonstrate that non-Abelian anyons in Turaev-Viro quantum error correcting codes can be moved over a distance of order the code distance by a constant depth local quantum circuit followed by a permutation of qubits. When applied to the Fibonacci surface code, our results demonstrate that a universal logical gate set can be implemented on encoded qubits through a constant depth unitary quantum circuit, and without increasing the asymptotic scaling of the space overhead. The resulting space-time overhead is optimal for topological codes with local syndromes. Our result reformulates the notion of anyon braiding as an effectively instantaneous process, rather than as an adiabatic, slow process.