Efficient and high-performance routing of lattice-surgery paths on three-dimensional lattice

Quantum 10, 2061 (2026).

https://doi.org/10.22331/q-2026-04-13-2061

Encoding logical qubits with surface codes and performing multi-qubit logical operations with lattice surgery is one of the most promising approaches to demonstrate fault-tolerant quantum computing. Thus, a method to efficiently schedule a sequence of lattice-surgery operations is vital for high-performance fault-tolerant quantum computing. A possible strategy to improve the throughput of lattice-surgery operations is splitting a large instruction into several small instructions, such as Bell state preparation and measurements, and executing a part of them in advance. However, scheduling methods to fully utilize this idea have yet to be explored. In this paper, we propose a fast and high-performance scheduling algorithm for lattice-surgery instructions leveraging this strategy. We achieved this by converting the scheduling problem of lattice-surgery instructions to a graph problem of embedding 3D paths into a 3D lattice, which enables us to explore efficient scheduling by solving path search problems in the 3D lattice. Based on this reduction, we propose a method to solve the path-finding problems, the look-ahead Dijkstra projection. We numerically show that this method reduced the execution time of benchmark programs generated from quantum phase estimation algorithms by 3.8 times compared with a naive method based on greedy algorithms. Our study establishes the relation between the lattice-surgery scheduling and graph search problems, which leads to further theoretical analysis on compiler optimization of fault-tolerant quantum computing.