An analytic study of the independent coherent errors in the surface code

Abstract: The realistic coherent errors could induce very different behaviors compared with their stochastic counterparts in the quantum error correction (QEC) and fault tolerant quantum computation. Their impacts are believed to be very subtle, more detrimental and hard to analyze compared to those ideal stochastic errors. In this paper, we study the independent coherent error due to the imperfect unitary rotation on each physical qubit of the toric code. We find that the surface code under coherent error satisfies generalized Knill-Laflamme (K-L) criterion and falls into the category of approximate QEC. The extra term in the generalized K-L criterion corresponds to the coherent part of the error channel at logical level, and then show that the generalized K-L criterion approaches the normal K-L criterion when the code distance becomes large. In addition, we also find that if the code with a fixed distance d is $\epsilon$-correctable, the value of $\epsilon$ describing the accuracy of the approximate QEC cannot be smaller than a lower bound. We then study the success probability of QEC under such coherent errors, and confirm that the exact success probability under coherent error is smaller than the results using Pauli twirling approximation at physical level.