A Device for Realizing Error Correction with a Distance-3 Surface Code using Superconducting Circuits

Quantum error correction is a key challenge in the field of quantum computing and a next milestone to be passed is to demonstrate the correction of bit- and phase-flip errors on a logical qubit. A promising approach to quantum error correction is the surface code, where physical qubits are arranged into a 2D grid. For a distance-3 code, the smallest distance that can correct single-qubit bit- and phase-flip errors, the surface code uses 9 data qubits for encoding the logical state and 8 ancilla qubits for performing measurements of the error syndromes. In this talk, we discuss the design and realization of a 17 qubit superconducting quantum device used to implement the distance-3 surface code. We characterized the device performance of the elementary operations needed to implement quantum error correction, including single and two-qubit gates, qubit readout and weight-2 and weight-4 stabilizer measurements.