Flagging the Clifford hierarchy:~Fault-tolerant logical $\fracπ{2^l}$ rotations via measuring circuit gauge operators of non-Cliffords

Abstract

We provide a recursively defined sequence of flag circuits which will detect logical errors induced by non-fault-tolerant $R_{\overline{Z}}(\fracπ{2^l})$ gates on CSS codes with a fault distance of two. As applications, we give a family of circuits with $O(l)$ gates and ancillae which implement fault-tolerant logical $R_{Z}(\fracπ{2^l})$ or $R_{ZZ}(\fracπ{2^l})$ gates on any $[[k + 2, k, 2]]$ iceberg code and fault-tolerant circuits of size $O(l)$ for preparing $|\fracπ{2^l}\rangle$ resource states in the $[[7,1,3]]$ code, which can be used to perform fault-tolerant $R_{\overline{Z}}(\fracπ{2^l})$ rotations via gate teleportation, allowing for implementations of these gates that bypass the high overheads of gate synthesis when $l$ is small relative to the precision required. We show how the circuits above can be generalized to $π( x_0.x_{1}x_{2}\ldots x_{l}) = \sum_{j}^{l} π\frac{x_j}{2^j}$ rotations with identical overheads in $l$, which could be useful in quantum simulations where time is digitized in binary. Finally, we illustrate two approaches to increase the fault-distance of our construction. We show how to increase the fault distance of a Cliffordized version of the T gate circuit to $3$ in the Steane code and how to increase the fault-distance of the $\fracπ{2}$ iceberg circuit to $4$ through concatenation in two-level iceberg codes. This yields a targeted logical $R_{\overline{Z}}(\fracπ{2})$ gate with fault distance $4$ on any row of logical qubits in an $[[(k_2+2)(k_1+2), k_1k_2, 4]]$ code.

Figures (15)

• Figure 1: A weight-three gauge operator of a CX gate.
• Figure 2: A gauge operator for an arbitrary unitary gate $U$, constructed by propagating an operator $V$ backwards through $U$.
• Figure 3: Single gate failure of $ZZ$ type in a non-fault-tolerant $R_{ZZ_{q_i,q_b}}(\theta)$ rotation resulting in a logical $Z$ error.
• Figure 4: Top: circuit gauge operators for $R_{ZZ}(\pi/2)$ that anticommute with $XX$, $YY$, or $ZZ$ errors occurring immediately after the $R_{ZZ}(\pi/2)$ gate. Bottom: A flag circuit which measures these gauge operators, achieving fault distance 2.
• Figure 5: Measurement of a gauge operator of $R_{ZZ_{q_b,q_i}}(\pi/4)$. The flag $a_0$ will detect the $ZZ$ error shown in blue, but the flag circuitry itself introduces an undetected error shown in red.

Theorems & Definitions (3)

• Definition 1
• Definition 2
• Definition 3