Handling fabrication defects in hex-grid surface codes Recent work has shown that a hexagonal grid qubit layout, with only three couplers per qubit, is sufficient to implement the surface code with performance comparable to that of a traditional four-coup...

Looks like 3-coupler / hex implementation of the surface code can now tolerate dropout! www.arxiv.org/abs/2508.08116

Using time-dynamics, the surface code can be embedded on a hexagonal lattice rather than a square lattice. In our new paper, we show that these hex-grid circuits can still be adapted to broken qubits and couplers, despite their sparser connectivity: arxiv.org/abs/2508.08116.