Noise Threshold for a Fault-Tolerant Two-Dimensional Lattice Architecture

We consider a model of quantum computation in which the set of operations is limited to nearest-neighbor interactions on a 2D lattice. We model movement of qubits with noisy SWAP operations. For this architecture we design a fault-tolerant coding scheme using the concatenated [[7,1,3]] Steane code. Our scheme is potentially applicable to ion-trap and solid-state quantum technologies. We calculate a lower bound on the noise threshold for our local model using a detailed failure probability analysis. We obtain a threshold of 1.85 x 10^-5 for the local setting, where memory error rates are one-tenth of the failure rates of gates, measurement, and preparation steps. For the analogous nonlocal setting, we obtain a noise threshold of 3.61 x 10^-5. Our results thus show that the additional SWAP operations required to move qubits in the local model affect the noise threshold only moderately.