Topological Code Switching in Two Dimensions

To exploit the particular advantages of different topological codes for fault-tolerant quantum computation, it is desirable to be able to switch between them. We propose a lattice surgery-based procedure for the fault-tolerant transfer of quantum information between arbitrary topological codes in two dimensions that can be employed to teleport quantum information between surface and color codes. While the former encoding is more robust, the latter supports the transversal implementation of the whole Clifford group. Our method hence provides a practical interface between noise resilient surface code memories and fault-tolerant color code processors.