Universal fault-tolerant logic with heterogeneous holographic codes

Abstract

The study of holographic bulk-boundary dualities has led to the construction of novel quantum error correcting codes. Although these codes have shed new light on conceptual aspects of these dualities, they have widely been believed to lack a crucial feature of practical quantum error correction: The ability to support universal fault-tolerant quantum logic. In this work, we introduce a new class of holographic codes that realize this feature. These heterogeneous holographic codes are constructed by combining two seed codes in a tensor network on an alternating hyperbolic tiling. We show how this construction generalizes previous strategies for fault tolerance in tree-type concatenated codes, allowing one to implement non-Clifford gates fault-tolerantly on the holographic boundary. We also demonstrate that these codes allow for high erasure thresholds under a suitable heterogeneous combination of specific seed codes. Compared to previous concatenated codes, heterogeneous holographic codes achieve large overhead savings in physical qubits, e.g., a $21.8\%$ reduction for a two-layer Steane/quantum Reed-Muller combination. Unlike standard concatenated codes, we establish that the new codes can encode more than a single logical qubit per code block by applying ``black hole'' deformations with tunable rate and distance, while possessing fully addressable, universal fault-tolerant gate sets. Therefore, our work strengthens the case for the utility of holographic quantum codes for practical quantum computing.