Erasure Minesweeper: exploring hybrid-erasure surface code architectures for efficient quantum error correction

Abstract: Dual-rail erasure qubits can substantially improve the efficiency of quantum error correction, allowing lower error rates to be achieved with fewer qubits, but each erasure qubit requires $3\times$ more transmons to implement compared to standard qubits. In this work, we introduce a hybrid-erasure architecture for surface code error correction where a carefully chosen subset of qubits is designated as erasure qubits while the rest remain standard. Through code-capacity analysis and circuit-level simulations, we show that a hybrid-erasure architecture can boost the performance of the surface code -- much like how a game of Minesweeper becomes easier once a few squares are revealed -- while using fewer resources than a full-erasure architecture. We study strategies for the allocation and placement of erasure qubits through analysis and simulations. We then use the hybrid-erasure architecture to explore the trade-offs between per-qubit cost and key logical performance metrics such as threshold and effective distance in surface code error correction. Our results show that the strategic introduction of dual-rail erasure qubits in a transmon architecture can enhance the logical performance of surface codes for a fixed transmon budget, particularly for near-term-relevant transmon counts and logical error rates.