Papers › A proposal for a minimal surface code experiment
A proposal for a minimal surface code experiment
James R. Wootton, Andreas Peter, Janos R. Winkler, Daniel Loss
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
Current quantum technology is approaching the system sizes and fidelities required for quantum error correction. It is therefore important to determine exactly what is needed for proof-of-principle experiments, which will be the first major step towards fault-tolerant quantum computation. Here we propose a surface code based experiment that is the smallest, both in terms of code size and circuit depth, that would allow errors to be detected and corrected for both the X and Z basis of a qubit. This requires $17$ physical qubits initially prepared in a product state, on which $16$ two-qubit entangling gates are applied before a final measurement of all qubits. A platform agnostic error model is applied to give some idea of the noise levels required for success. It is found that a true demonstration of quantum error correction will require fidelities for the preparation and measurement of qubits and the entangling gates to be above 99%.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections