Blocklet concatenation: Low-overhead fault-tolerant protocols for fusion-based quantum computation

Abstract

We introduce a construction for protocols for fault-tolerant quantum computing based on code concatenation and transversal gates. These protocols can be interpreted as families of quantum circuits of low-weight stabilizer measurements without strict locality constraints, effectively implementing concatenated codes. However, we primarily study these protocols in the context of photonic fusion-based quantum computing (FBQC), where they yield families of fusion networks with constant-sized resource states. Their high erasure thresholds relative to their resource-state cost establish them as promising candidates to replace surface codes in the context of FBQC. Examples include protocol families using 8-, 10- and 12-qubit resource states, with erasure thresholds of 13.8%, 19.1% and 11.5%, and footprint-per-logical-qubit scaling as $\mathcal{O}(d)$, $\mathcal{O}(d^{1.46})$ and $\mathcal{O}(d^{0.58})$, respectively, where $d$ is the code distance. We also present techniques for performing logical operations, decoding, and implementing the protocols in photonic hardware. Although we focus on photonic FBQC, these ideas may also be of interest in other settings.