Designing fault-tolerant quantum computers requires accurate simulations that account for real-world hardware imperfections. Plaquette v2024.8 now significantly enhances this capability, enabling researchers and engineers to iterate faster toward optimal fault-tolerant architectures.

This release brings several major upgrades:

• 5000x speed improvements to the xpauli backend: Our extended-Pauli simulator, xpauli, is now 5000 times faster. This dramatic speed increase allows rapid simulations of quantum error correction (QEC) circuits involving thousands of qubits while accurately modeling imperfections such as leakage and scattering.

• Support for simulation of real hardware imperfections: With dedicated error models for native neutral-atom imperfections and a new interface to our physics module, users can now specify Hamiltonians or Lindbladians to accurately describe the evolution of their systems. This enables realistic fault-tolerance simulations under arbitrary hardware imperfections.

• Introduction of the full_state simulator backend: For exact simulations without approximations, our new full_state backend represents and evolves the full quantum state of the system. This allows for precise fault-tolerance simulations, including coherent errors, over/under-rotations, and imperfections involving qubit leakage or scattering.

These advancements empower our customers to design optimal quantum computer architectures by accurately simulating realistic hardware imperfections in circuits comprising many thousands of qubits.

As an example, Plaquette v2024.8 allows for the first time, the estimation of the error threshold for a surface code in the presence of intermediate-state scattering, a crucial imperfection in neutral atom quantum processors:

If you're interested in learning more, reach out to us at hello@plaquette.design.