Towards practical classical processing for the surface code: timing analysis

Austin G. Fowler, Adam C. Whiteside, Lloyd C. L. Hollenberg

Published 2012-02-25, updated 2012-10-15Version 2

Topological quantum error correction codes have high thresholds and are well suited to physical implementation. The minimum weight perfect matching algorithm can be used to efficiently handle errors in such codes. We perform a timing analysis of our current implementation of the minimum weight perfect matching algorithm. Our implementation performs the classical processing associated with an nxn lattice of qubits realizing a square surface code storing a single logical qubit of information in a fault-tolerant manner. We empirically demonstrate that our implementation requires only O(n^2) average time per round of error correction for code distances ranging from 4 to 512 and a range of depolarizing error rates. We also describe tests we have performed to verify that it always obtains a true minimum weight perfect matching.