High-Threshold Fusion-Based Quantum Computation with Optical Hybrid Qubits

Abstract

Hybrid discrete- and continuous-variable (DV-CV) encodings have been developed to overcome operational drawbacks of each individual encoding, while fusion-based quantum computation (FBQC) has emerged to address the practical challenges of scalability toward fault-tolerant photonic quantum computation. Here we introduce hybrid FBQC using small optical DV-CV hybrid resource states connected through hybrid fusions, to combine the advantages of both approaches. We develop protocols for directly generating these resource states without requiring local hybrid logic such as the Hadamard gate, together with a tailored decoding strategy that exploits the error information contained in individual hybrid-fusion outcomes. We demonstrate that hybrid FBQC achieves a photon loss threshold of 2.231% while requiring only 12 hybrid fusions per surface-code unit cell, substantially improving upon the 0.89% threshold and 60-fusion requirement of previous hybrid measurement-based scheme. These results establish optical hybrid FBQC as a high-threshold resource-efficient route to scalable fault-tolerant photonic quantum computation.