What does lattice surgery implement?

Question: In surface-code lattice surgery, what operation is most directly implemented by merging and splitting code patches? A) Arbitrary physical SWAP gates between every pair of data qubits B) Direct tomography of the full logical density matrix C) Joint logical Pauli measurements between encoded patches D) Continuous analog simulation of a Hamiltonian Correct: C Explanation: Lattice surgery manipulates code patches so that joint logical observables can be measured fault-tolerantly. These measurements can then be used to implement encoded operations, teleportation-style logic, and entangling gates. Topic: advanced quantum computing / lattice surgery / surface code