Active volume: An architecture for efficient fault-tolerant quantum computers with limited non-local connections

Abstract: In existing general-purpose architectures for surface-code-based fault-tolerant quantum computers, the cost of a quantum computation is determined by the circuit volume, i.e., the number of qubits multiplied by the number of non-Clifford gates. We introduce an architecture using non-2D-local connections in which the cost does not scale with the number of qubits, and instead only with the number of logical operations. Each logical operation has an associated active volume, such that the cost of a quantum computation can be quantified as a sum of active volumes of all operations. For quantum computations with thousands of logical qubits, the active volume can be orders of magnitude lower than the circuit volume. Importantly, the architecture does not require all-to-all connectivity between N logical qubits. Instead, each logical qubit is connected to O(log N) other sites. As an example, we show that, using the same number of logical qubits, a 2048-bit factoring algorithm can be executed 44 times faster than on a general-purpose architecture without non-local connections. With photonic qubits, long-range connections are available and we show how photonic components can be used to construct a fusion-based active-volume quantum computer.