1303.4026 (Ali Abu Nada et al.)

Relative performance of ancilla verification and decoding in the
[[7,1,3]] Steane code    [PDF]

Ali Abu Nada, Ben Fortescue, Mark Byrd

We present numerical simulation results comparing the logical error rates for the fault-tolerant [[7,1,3]] Steane code using the technique of ancilla verification vs. the newer method of ancilla decoding as described in [D.P. DiVincenzo and P. Aliferis, PRL 98, 020501 (2007)]. We simulate a realistic QEC procedure in which failed ancilla creation requires storing the data until a new ancilla can be created; we find that the decoding method, which avoids the need for such storage, has an advantage when the failure probability is sufficiently high. We additionally analyze the effect of different classes of physical error (initialization, measurement, hold etc.) on the relative performance of these two methods.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.4026