Modeling the performance of the surface code with non-uniform error distribution: Part 2

Quantum error correction with the surface code is a promising route towards fault-tolerant quantum computation. Most numerical simulations of the surface code use simplified noise models with identical error rates on all qubits. However, real quantum processors have nontrivial error distributions, where some qubits are significantly worse than others. We analyze the dependence of the code performance on the distribution of the physical error rates in the system, and develop a simple and fast predictive model of the logical error rate.