Quantum computing by color-code lattice surgery

Abstract: We demonstrate how to use lattice surgery to enact a universal set of fault-tolerant quantum operations with color codes. Along the way, we also improve existing surface-code lattice-surgery methods. Lattice-surgery methods use fewer qubits and the same time or less than associated defect-braiding methods. Furthermore, per code distance, color-code lattice surgery uses approximately half the qubits and the same time or less than surface-code lattice surgery. Color-code lattice surgery can also implement the Hadamard and phase gates in a single transversal step---much faster than surface-code lattice surgery can. Against uncorrelated circuit-level depolarizing noise, color-code lattice surgery uses fewer qubits to achieve the same degree of fault-tolerant error suppression as surface-code lattice surgery when the noise rate is low enough and the error suppression demand is high enough.