Fault-tolerant quantum computation with local gates

The performance of fault-tolerant quantum computation with concatenated codes using local gates in small numbers of spatial dimensions is discussed. It is shown that a threshold result still exists in three, two, or one spatial dimensions when next-to-nearest-neighbour gates are available, and explicit constructions are presented. In two or three dimensions, it is also shown how nearest-neighbour gates can give a threshold result. In all cases, it is simply demonstrated that a threshold exists, and no attempt to optimize the error correction circuit or to determine the exact value of the threshold is made. The additional overhead due to the fault-tolerance in both space and time is polylogarithmic in the error rate per logical gate.