Towards the Characterization of Logical Errors in Distributed Lattice Surgery
TL;DR
This work analyzes distributed lattice surgery under heterogeneous noise conditions, focusing in particular on the merge operation as one of its fundamental subroutines, the XX merge operation between two rotated surface-code patches hosted on two different quantum processors.
Abstract
Distributed quantum computing offers a scalable alternative to monolithic quantum processors by networking smaller quantum modules through shared entangled pairs. A central challenge in this setting is that inter-module quantum operations are typically noisier than intra-module local gates, which introduces additional noise into the system. In this work, we analyze distributed lattice surgery under heterogeneous noise conditions, focusing in particular on the merge operation as one of its fundamental subroutines. Specifically, we discuss the XX merge operation between two rotated surface-code patches hosted on two different quantum processors. We characterize logical errors in the resulting H-shaped spacetime diagram and estimate thresholds using a minimum-weight perfect matching (MWPM) decoder. We use a phenomenological noise model and derive distinct bulk and seam error rates to approximate a circuit-level noise model that includes contributions from local CNOT gates, noisy entangled pairs, idle errors, and readout errors. Our results provide practical insights into selecting the optimal surface-code distance, establishing target local-gate fidelities, and determining the tolerable entangled-pair fidelity required for logical operations in a distributed architecture.