Breakdown of Surface Code Error Correction Due to Coupling to a Bosonic Bath

Abstract: We consider a surface code suffering decoherence due to coupling to a bath of bosonic modes at finite temperature and study the time available before the unavoidable breakdown of error correction occurs as a function of coupling and bath parameters. We derive an exact expression for the error rate on each individual qubit of the code, taking spatial and temporal correlations between the errors into account. We investigate numerically how different kinds of spatial correlations between errors in the surface code affect its threshold error rate. This allows us to derive the maximal duration of each quantum error correction period by studying when the single-qubit error rate reaches the corresponding threshold. At the time when error correction breaks down, the error rate in the code can be dominated by the direct coupling of each qubit to the bath, by mediated subluminal interactions, or by mediated superluminal interactions. For a 2D Ohmic bath, the time available per quantum error correction period vanishes in the thermodynamic limit of a large code size $L$ due to induced superluminal interactions, though it does so only like $1/\sqrt{\log L}$. For all other bath types considered, this time remains finite as $L\rightarrow\infty$.