The Art of Optimizing T-Depth for Quantum Error Correction in Large-Scale Quantum Computing

Avimita Chatterjee1, Archisman Ghosh2, Swaroop Ghosh1
1Pennsylvania State University, 2The Pennsylvania State University


Abstract

Quantum Error Correction (QEC), combined with magic state distillation, ensures fault tolerance in large-scale quantum computation. To apply QEC, a circuit must first be transformed into a non-Clifford (or T) gate set. T-depth, the number of sequential T-gate layers, determines the magic state cost, impacting both spatial and temporal overhead. Minimizing T-depth is crucial for optimizing resource efficiency in fault-tolerant quantum computing. While QEC scalability has been widely studied, T-depth reduction remains an overlooked challenge. It is established that T-depth reduction is an NP-hard problem and we systematically evaluate multiple approximation techniques: greedy, divide-and-conquer, Lookahead-based brute force, and graph-based. The Lookahead-based brute-force algorithm (partition size 4) performs best, optimizing 90\% of reducible cases (i.e., circuits where at least one algorithm achieved optimization) with an average T-depth reduction of around 51\%. Additionally, we introduce an expansion factor-based identity gate insertion strategy, leveraging controlled redundancy to achieve deeper reductions in circuits initially classified as non-reducible. With this approach, we successfully convert up to 25\% of non-reducible circuits into reducible ones, while achieving an additional average reduction of up to 11.8\%. Furthermore, we analyze the impact of different expansion factor values and explore how varying the partition size in the Lookahead-based brute-force algorithm influences the quality of T-depth reduction.