Constant depth fault-tolerant Clifford circuits for multi-qubit large block codes

Abstract

Fault-tolerant quantum computation (FTQC) schemes using large block codes that encode $k>1$ qubits in $n$ physical qubits can potentially reduce the resource overhead to a great extent because of their high encoding rate. However, the fault-tolerant (FT) logical operations for the encoded qubits are difficult to find and implement, which usually takes not only a very large resource overhead but also long $\textit{in-situ}$ computation time. In this paper, we focus on Calderbank-Shor-Steane $[\![ n,k,d ]\!]$ (CSS) codes and their logical FT Clifford circuits. We show that the depth of an arbitrary logical Clifford circuit can be implemented fault-tolerantly in $O(1)$ steps \emph{in-situ} via either Knill or Steane syndrome measurement circuit, with the qualified ancilla states efficiently prepared. Particularly, for those codes satisfying $k/n\sim \Theta(1)$, the resource scaling for Clifford circuits implementation on the logical level can be the same as on the physical level up to a constant, which is independent of code distance $d$. With a suitable pipeline to produce ancilla states, our scheme requires only a modest resource cost in physical qubits, physical gates, and computation time for very large scale FTQC.