  We study the dependence of the fidelity of the surface code in the presence
of a single finite-temperature massless bosonic environment after a quantum
error correction cycle. The three standard types of environment are considered:
super-Ohmic, Ohmic, and sub-Ohmic. Our results show that, for regimes relevant
to current experiments, quantum error correction works well even in the
presence of environment-induced, long-range inter-qubit interactions. A
threshold always exists at finite temperatures, although its temperature
dependence is very sensitive to the type of environment. For the super-Ohmic
case, the critical coupling constant separating high- from low-fidelity
decreases with increasing temperature. For both Ohmic and super-Ohmic cases,
the dependence of the critical coupling on temperature is weak. In all cases,
the critical coupling is determined by microscopic parameters of the
environment. For the sub-Ohmic case, it also depends strongly on the duration
of the QEC cycle.
