Low-overhead fault-tolerant quantum computation by gauging logical operators

Quantum computation must be performed in a fault-tolerant manner to be realizable in practice. Recent progress has uncovered quantum error-correcting codes with sparse connectivity requirements and constant qubit overhead. Existing schemes for fault-tolerant logical measurement do not always achieve low qubit overhead. Here we present a low-overhead method to implement fault-tolerant logical measurement in a quantum error-correcting code by treating the logical operator as a symmetry and gauging it. The gauging measurement procedure introduces a high degree of flexibility that can be leveraged to achieve a qubit overhead that is linear in the weight of the operator being measured up to a polylogarithmic factor. This flexibility also allows the procedure to be adapted to arbitrary quantum codes. Our results provide a new, more efficient, approach to performing fault-tolerant quantum computation, making it more tractable for near-term implementation.