Surface code fidelity at finite temperatures

Abstract: We study the dependence of the fidelity of the surface code in the presence of a single finite-temperature massless bosonic environment after a quantum error correction cycle. The three standard types of environment are considered: super-Ohmic, Ohmic, and sub-Ohmic. Our results show that, for regimes relevant to current experiments, quantum error correction works well even in the presence of environment-induced, long-range inter-qubit interactions. A threshold always exists at finite temperatures, although its temperature dependence is very sensitive to the type of environment. For the super-Ohmic case, the critical coupling constant separating high- from low-fidelity decreases with increasing temperature. For both Ohmic and super-Ohmic cases, the dependence of the critical coupling on temperature is weak. In all cases, the critical coupling is determined by microscopic parameters of the environment. For the sub-Ohmic case, it also depends strongly on the duration of the QEC cycle.