Demonstrating Building Blocks of Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computation with the Color Code on a Superconducting Processor

Quantum error correction is widely regarded as essential to bridge the gap between error rates of current quantum processors and the extremely low logical error rates required for practical quantum computing tasks. While recent experiments using superconducting devices have predominantly focused on the surface error-correcting code due to its high error threshold and compatibility with 4-nearest-neighbor connectivity, advances in physical qubit performance, syndrome extraction circuits, and decoding algorithms open new avenues for exploring more efficient codes on existing hardware.

In this talk, we present a comprehensive demonstration of the building blocks of fault-tolerant quantum computation using the color code on a superconducting device. We conduct a distance-scaling experiment, characterize single-qubit logical gates, explore magic state injection, and implement lattice surgery between two logical qubits. These results provide a promising foundation for scaling up fault-tolerant quantum computing on superconducting devices with more resource-efficient codes in the near future.