Performance of the spin qubit shuttling architecture for a surface code implementation
4 affiliations
- 1Institute for Quantum Information, RWTH Aachen University, 52074 Aachen, Germany
- 2Institute for Theoretical Nanoelectronics (PGI-2), Forschungszentrum Jülich, 52428 Jülich, Germany
- 3JARA-FIT Institute for Quantum Information, Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH and RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany
- 4ARQUE Systems GmbH, 52074 Aachen, Germany
Abstract
Qubit shuttling promises to advance some quantum computing platforms to the qubit register sizes needed for effective quantum error correction (QEC), but also introduces additional errors whose impact must be evaluated. The established method to investigate the performance of QEC codes in a realistic scenario is to employ a standard noise model known as circuit-level noise, where all quantum operations are modeled as noisy. In the present work, we take this noise model and single out the effect of shuttling errors by introducing them as an additional so-called error location. This hardware abstraction is motivated by the SpinBus architecture and allows a systematic numerical investigation to map out the resulting two-dimensional parameter space. To this end, we take the Surface code and perform large scale simulations, most notably extracting the threshold across said two-dimensional parameter space. We study two scenarios for shuttling errors, depolarization on the one hand and dephasing on the other hand. For a purely dephasing shuttling error, we find a threshold of several percent, provided that all other operations have a high fidelity. The qubit overhead needed to reach a logical error rate of 10 − 12 (known as the "teraquop" regime \cite{Gidney2021Jul} increases only moderately for shuttling error rates up to about 1 % per shuttling operation. The error rates at which practically useful, i.e. well below threshold error correction is predicted to be possible are comfortably higher than what is expected to be achievable for spin qubits. Our results thus show that it is reasonable to expect shuttling operations to fall below threshold already at surprisingly large error rates. With realistic efforts in the near term, this offers positive prospects for spin qubit based quantum processors as a viable avenue for scalable fault-tolerant error-corrected quantum computing.
Related
- Transversal Gates and Magic State Distillation in an Optimally Synthesized Spin-Qubit Shuttling Bus
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- SpinHex: A low-crosstalk, spin-qubit architecture based on multielectron couplers
- Blind Remote Implementation of Arbitrary Two-Qubit Unitary Operation via Pre-Shared Entanglement
- Nanoscale Stray Fields from Micromagnets for Optimal Spin Qubit Architecture
BibTeX
@article{yenilen2026performance,
title = {{Performance of the spin qubit shuttling architecture for a surface code implementation}},
author = {Berat Yenilen and Arnau Sala and Hendrik Bluhm and Markus Müller and Manuel Rispler},
journal = {Quantum},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.22331/q-2026-09-30-2219},
url = {https://quantum-journal.org/papers/q-2026-09-30-2219/},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - Performance of the spin qubit shuttling architecture for a surface code implementation
AU - Berat Yenilen
AU - Arnau Sala
AU - Hendrik Bluhm
AU - Markus Müller
AU - Manuel Rispler
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/30
JO - Quantum
DO - 10.22331/q-2026-09-30-2219
UR - https://quantum-journal.org/papers/q-2026-09-30-2219/
AB - Qubit shuttling promises to advance some quantum computing platforms to the qubit register sizes needed for effective quantum error correction (QEC), but also introduces additional errors whose impact must be evaluated. The established method to investigate the performance of QEC codes in a realistic scenario is to employ a standard noise model known as circuit-level noise, where all quantum operations are modeled as noisy. In the present work, we take this noise model and single out the effect of shuttling errors by introducing them as an additional so-called error location. This hardware abstraction is motivated by the SpinBus architecture and allows a systematic numerical investigation to map out the resulting two-dimensional parameter space. To this end, we take the Surface code and perform large scale simulations, most notably extracting the threshold across said two-dimensional parameter space. We study two scenarios for shuttling errors, depolarization on the one hand and dephasing on the other hand. For a purely dephasing shuttling error, we find a threshold of several percent, provided that all other operations have a high fidelity. The qubit overhead needed to reach a logical error rate of 10 − 12 (known as the "teraquop" regime \cite{Gidney2021Jul} increases only moderately for shuttling error rates up to about 1 % per shuttling operation. The error rates at which practically useful, i.e. well below threshold error correction is predicted to be possible are comfortably higher than what is expected to be achievable for spin qubits. Our results thus show that it is reasonable to expect shuttling operations to fall below threshold already at surprisingly large error rates. With realistic efforts in the near term, this offers positive prospects for spin qubit based quantum processors as a viable avenue for scalable fault-tolerant error-corrected quantum computing.
SN - 2521-327X
ER -