Rare Event Simulation of Quantum Error-Correcting Circuits

Abstract: We describe a practical approach for accessing the logical failure rates of quantum error-correcting (QEC) circuits under low physical (component) failure rate regimes. Standard Monte Carlo is often the de facto approach for studying the failure rates of quantum circuits. However, in the study of fault-tolerant error-correcting circuits, the ability to extend this approach to low physical failure rates is limited. In particular, the use of Monte Carlo to access circuits that are relatively large or have high correcting power becomes more difficult as we lower the input failure rates of the individual components (gates) in the circuit. For these reasons, many simulations studying the circuit model go no lower than end-to-end logical failure rates in the 10^{-6} regime. In this report, we outline an approach that borrows from earlier work by Bravyi and Vargo to the more complex circuit noise model. Earlier works studied both the capacity and phenomenological noise models, but the work is insufficient for generating similar simulations in the circuit-noise model. To the best of our knowledge, our team is the first to develop a full prescription of the rare event simulation by splitting technique for the circuit-based noise model. We have also generated promising results that are confirmed by standard Monte Carlo simulation under an accessible regime. This work shows that we can access noise in the circuit-model prescription of quantum error-correcting code to failure rates below 10^{-20} regime.