The surface code is a promising candidate for fault-tolerant quantum computation, achieving a high threshold error rate with nearest-neighbor gates in two spatial dimensions. Here, through a series of numerical simulations, we investigate how the precise value of the threshold depends on the noise model, measurement circuits, and decoding algorithm. We observe thresholds between 0.502(1)% and 1.140(1)% per gate, values which are generally lower than previous estimates.
@article{arxiv.1311.5003,
title = {Fault-tolerant thresholds for quantum error correction with the surface code},
author = {Ashley M. Stephens},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1311.5003},
year = {2014}
}