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Erasure qubits: Overcoming the T₁ limit in superconducting circuits

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Shows that converting dominant decay errors (T₁) into detectable erasure errors dramatically reduces the overhead for fault-tolerant quantum computing with superconducting circuits. A transmon-like qubit can be operated as an erasure qubit by detecting leakage out of the computational subspace, converting the dominant error channel from undetectable to detectable.

Key Results

  • Erasure conversion can reduce surface code overhead by 3–10× compared to standard depolarizing noise
  • Threshold for erasure errors (~50%) far exceeds threshold for Pauli errors (~1%)
  • Applicable to dual-rail superconducting cavities and metastable transmon schemes
  • Provides a concrete path to lower-overhead fault tolerance

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