Fault Tolerance by Construction

Abstract

A key challenge in fault-tolerant quantum computing is synthesising and optimising circuits in a noisy environment, as traditional techniques often fail to account for the effect of noise on circuits. In this work, we propose and numerically verify a framework for designing fault-tolerant quantum circuits that are correct by construction. The framework starts with idealised specifications of fault-tolerant gadgets and refines them using provably sound basic transformations. To reason about manipulating circuits while preserving their error correction properties, we define fault equivalence; two circuits are considered fault-equivalent if all undetectable faults on one circuit have a corresponding fault on the other. This guarantees that the effect of undetectable faults on both circuits is the same. We argue that fault equivalence is a concept that is already implicitly present in the literature. Many problems, such as state preparation and syndrome extraction, can be naturally expressed as finding an implementable circuit that is fault-equivalent to an idealized specification. To utilize fault equivalence in a computationally tractable manner, we adapt the ZX calculus, a diagrammatic language for quantum computing. We restrict its rewrite system to not only preserve the underlying linear map but also fault equivalence, i.e. the circuit's behaviour under noise. Enabled by our framework, we verify, optimise, and synthesise new and efficient circuits for syndrome extraction and cat state preparation. We confirm the improved performance of our optimised circuits in simulation. We anticipate that fault equivalence can capture and unify different approaches in fault-tolerant quantum computing, paving the way for an end-to-end circuit compilation framework.