Strategies for a practical advantage of fault-tolerant circuit design in noisy trapped-ion quantum computers

Fault-tolerant quantum error correction provides a strategy to protect information processed by a quantum computer against noise which would otherwise corrupt the data. A fault-tolerant universal quantum computer must implement a universal gate set on the logical level in order to perform arbitrary calculations to in principle unlimited precision. In this paper we characterize the recent demonstration of a fault-tolerant universal gate set in a trapped-ion quantum computer [Postler et al., Nature (London) 605, 7911 (2022)] and identify aspects to improve the design of experimental setups to reach an advantage of logical over physical qubit operation. We show that various criteria to assess the break-even point for fault-tolerant quantum operations are within reach for the ion trap quantum computing architecture under consideration. Furthermore, we analyze the influence of crosstalk in entangling gates for logical state preparation circuits. These circuits can be designed to respect fault tolerance for specific microscopic noise models. We find that an experimentally informed depolarizing noise model captures the essential noise dynamics of the fault-tolerant experiment that we consider, and crosstalk is negligible in the currently accessible regime of physical error rates. For deterministic Pauli state preparation, we provide a fault-tolerant unitary logical qubit initialization circuit, which can be realized without in-sequence measurement and feed-forward of classical information. Additionally, we show that nondeterministic state preparation schemes, i.e., repeat until success, for logical Pauli and magic states perform with higher logical fidelity over their deterministic counterparts for the current and anticipated future regime of physical error rates. Our results offer guidance on improvements of physical qubit operations and validate the experimentally informed noise model as a tool to predict logical failure rates in quantum computing architectures based on trapped ions.