Twins Percolation for Qubit Losses in Topological Color Codes

In this Letter, we establish and explore a new connection between quantum information theory and classical statistical mechanics by studying the problem of qubit losses in 2D topological color codes. We introduce a protocol to cope with qubit losses, which is based on the identification and removal of a twin qubit from the code, and which guarantees the recovery of a valid three-colorable and trivalent reconstructed color code. Moreover, we show that determining the corresponding qubit loss error threshold is equivalent to a new generalized classical percolation problem. We numerically compute the associated qubit loss thresholds for two families of 2D color code and find that with p=0.461±0.005 these are close to satisfying the fundamental limit of 50% as imposed by the no-cloning theorem. Our findings reveal a new connection between topological color codes and percolation theory, show high robustness of color codes against qubit loss, and are directly relevant for implementations of topological quantum error correction in various physical platforms.