Pei-Kai Tsai, Shruti Puri
The surface code is a promising candidate for fault-tolerant quantum computation and has been implemented in many quantum hardware platforms. In this work, we propose a new non-local unitary circuit to encode surface code states based on a code conversion between rotated and regular surface codes, which halves the circuit depth of the fastest unitary encoder known previously. While the unitary encoders can be used to increase the code size, the fault-distance remains fixed. Nonetheless, they can be used for space-time efficient preparation of eigenstates of the logical operators that cannot be easily accessed transversally such as the Pauli Y -eignestate and Clifford eigenstates. It may be expected that error propagation in the non-local circuit will make decoding more challenging compared to local ones. However, we find that conventional matching decoders can still be effectively used. Furthermore, we perform numerical simulations to benchmark the performance of our encoder against a local unitary encoder and the conventional stabilizer-measurement based approach for preparing the Pauli Y -eigenstate. We find that our encoder can outperform other approaches in certain experimentally relevant noise regimes. Therefore, our encoder provides practical advantage in platforms where non-local interactions are available such as neutral atoms and trapped ions.