TopoLS: Lattice Surgery Compilation via Topological Program Transformations
Abstract
Lattice surgery is a leading approach for implementing fault-tolerant logical operations in surface code quantum computing, but compiling efficient lattice surgery layouts remains challenging. Existing compilers are largely circuit-centric and operate directly on gate sequences, limiting their ability to exploit the topological flexibility of merge-split operations and minimize space--time volume. We present TopoLS, a topology-centric compiler that uses ZX diagrams as an intermediate representation for lattice surgery compilation. TopoLS combines semantic-preserving ZX-level program transformations, including spider fusion and topology-aware slicing, with a Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS)-based synthesis procedure that constructs pipe-diagram embeddings by jointly optimizing placement and routing in 3D space--time. To scale to large circuits, TopoLS further introduces topology-aware partitioning that decomposes the compilation task into bounded subproblems and limits the routing frontier during embedding. Across evaluated benchmarks, TopoLS achieves an average reduction in space--time volume over prior circuit-centric compilers, with improvements ranging from to , and exhibits strong empirical scalability on large benchmark families. Compared with SAT-based formulations that become intractable on larger instances, TopoLS offers a practical end-to-end solution for optimized lattice surgery compilation. TopoLS has been integrated into the TQEC ecosystem, enabling downstream circuit-level simulation and resource estimation workflows.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2601.23109,
title = {TopoLS: Lattice Surgery Compilation via Topological Program Transformations},
author = {Junyu Zhou and Yuhao Liu and Ethan Decker and Justin Kalloor and Mathias Weiden and Kean Chen and Costin Iancu and Gushu Li},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.23109},
year = {2026}
}