Enhanced Fault-tolerance in Photonic Quantum Computing: Floquet Code Outperforms Surface Code in Tailored Architecture

Abstract: Fault-tolerant quantum computing is crucial for realizing large-scale quantum computation, and the interplay between hardware architecture and quantum error-correcting codes is a key consideration. We present a comparative study of two quantum error-correcting codes - the surface code and the honeycomb Floquet code - implemented on variants of the spin-optical quantum computing architecture, enabling a direct comparison of the codes using consistent noise models. Our results demonstrate that the honeycomb Floquet code significantly outperforms the surface code in this setting. Notably, we achieve a photon loss threshold of 6.4% for the honeycomb Floquet code implementation - to our knowledge the highest reported for photonic platforms to date without large-scale multiplexing. This finding is particularly significant given that photon loss is the primary source of errors in photon-mediated quantum computing.