Correcting erasures with topological subsystem color codes

Qubit loss is one of the forms of noise encountered in some quantum technologies. Such noise is modeled using the quantum erasure channel. Unlike the depolarizing noise, it is much more tractable, yet the performance of many quantum codes over the erasure channel has not been studied as extensively. In this paper, we study the performance of topological subsystem color codes (TSCCs) over the quantum erasure channel. It is the first such study of TSCCs over the erasure channel. We propose multiple decoding algorithms for TSCC and obtain the highest threshold of about 9.7% for the subsystem color code derived from the square octagon lattice.