Hi all,
Tomorrow Valette Orane will tell us about their master thesis "Exploring the viability of cellular automaton decoders for the surface code". See below for the abstract. The talk will take place at 2pm in HIT E 41.1.
Best, Ladina
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Title: Exploring the viability of cellular automaton decoders for the surface code
Abstract: Quantum error correction has become indispensable in ensuring the protection of quantum information from noise and enabling fault-tolerant quantum computing. The Surface code is a quantum error-correcting code designed such that error-corrected qubits can be built in a two-dimensional architecture and only requiring local connectivity. Together with its high tolerance to quantum noise, the Surface Code currently stands as the most promising candidate for implementing error correction in quantum computing devices. In any error-correcting scheme, an integral component of the process is the decoding algorithms. They are tasked with producing accurate estimates of the errors from measured syndrome data so that these errors can subsequently be corrected. Such decoding algorithms need to be very fast but this speed requirement introduces a challenging tradeoff, where the complexity is only improved at the expense of accuracy and vice-versa. Interesting contestants for fast decoders are cellular automaton decoders. Because of their simplicity and how they reduce the decoding problem to simple local update rules, they exhibit reduced complexity. This reduced complexity however comes at the price of an accuracy that is lower than more complex algorithms, especially for codes like Surface codes without periodic boundaries. In this thesis, by building on previous projects of the group, we aim to investigate the viability of the cellular automaton decoder for the Surface Code, by experimenting with different ways of optimizing the algorithm for the Surface code with boundaries.