Hi all, 

Tomorrow our new postdoc Christopher Chubb will tell us about his research, in particular his latest paper "General tensor network decoding of 2D Pauli codes". See below for the abstract, or the full paper at https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.04125. We start at 2pm in zoom: https://ethz.zoom.us/j/362994444

Best,

Joe

Abstract:

In this work we develop a general tensor network decoder for 2D codes. Specifically, we propose a decoder which approximates maximally likelihood decoding for 2D stabiliser and subsystem codes subject to Pauli noise. For a code consisting of $n$ qubits our decoder has a runtime of $O(n\log n+n\chi^3)$, where $\chi$ is an approximation parameter. We numerically demonstrate the power of this decoder by studying four classes of codes under three noise models, namely regular surface codes, irregular surface codes, subsystem surface codes and colour codes, under bit-flip, phase-flip and depolarising noise. We show that the thresholds yielded by our decoder are state-of-the-art, and numerically consistent with optimal thresholds where available, suggesting that the tensor network decoder well approximates optimal decoding in all these cases. Novel to our decoder is an efficient and effective approximate contraction scheme for arbitrary 2D tensor networks, which may be of independent interest.