Boundaries of Acceptable Defectiveness: Redefining Surface Code Robustness under Heterogeneous Noise

Quantum Physics arXiv:2510.22001 (quant-ph) [Submitted on 24 Oct 2025] Title:Boundaries of Acceptable Defectiveness: Redefining Surface Code Robustness under Heterogeneous Noise Authors:Jacob S. Palmer, Kaitlin N. Smith View a PDF of the paper titled Boundaries of Acceptable Defectiveness: Redefining Surface Code Robustness under Heterogeneous Noise, by Jacob S. Palmer and Kaitlin N. Smith View PDF Abstract:A variety of past research on superconducting qubits shows that these devices exhibit considerable variation and thus cannot be accurately depicted by a uniform noise model. To combat this often unrealistic picture of homogeneous noise in quantum processors during runtime, our work aims to define the boundaries of acceptable defectiveness (BADs), or the upper boundary of a qubits physical error, past which this defective qubit entirely degrades the logical computation and should be considered faulty and removed from the surface code mapping. Using the QEC simulation package STIM, repetition code circuits on rotated surface codes were generated, sampled, and analyzed from distances 3 to 17, with various defective error rates and outlier defect locations. In addition, we simulated heterogeneous noise models using the same parameters to test how increasingly deviated distributions of physical errors scale across code distances under realistic, heterogeneous noise models that are informed by current superconducting hardware. The results suggest that there are, in fact, boundaries of acceptable defectiveness in which a defective qubit, with a physical error rate $ new | recent | 2025-10 Change to browse by: cs cs.ET References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADSGoogle Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Loading... BibTeX formatted citation × loading... Data provided by: Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) Links to Code Toggle Papers with Code (What is Papers with Code?) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate (What is Replicate?) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs. Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)