SurfBraid: A concept tool for preparing and resource estimating quantum circuits protected by the surface code

Abstract: The first generations of quantum computers will execute fault-tolerant quantum circuits, and it is very likely that such circuits will use surface quantum error correcting codes. To the best of our knowledge, no complete design automation tool for such circuits is currently available. This is to a large extent because such circuits have three dimensional layouts (e.g. two dimensional hardware and time axis as a third dimension) and their optimisation is still ongoing research. This work introduces SurfBraid, a tool for the automatic design of surface code protected quantum circuits -- it includes a complete workflow that compiles an arbitrary quantum circuit into an intermediary Clifford+T equivalent representation which is further synthesised and optimised to surface code protected structures (for the moment, braided defects). SurfBraid is arguably the first flexible (modular structure, extensible through user provided scripts) and interactive (automatically updating the results based on user interaction, browser based) tool for such circuits. One of the prototype's methodological novelty is its capability to automatically estimate the resources necessary for executing large fault-tolerant circuits. A prototype implementation and the corresponding source code are available at https://alexandrupaler.github.io/quantjs/.