arXiv subjects

Andrew W. Cross

Publications and source records attributed to Andrew W. Cross.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Concatenating Algebraic Codes over High-Rate Quantum LDPC Codes

Different quantum error correction schemes trade off overhead, error suppression, and hardware connectivity. Code concatenation can relax these tradeoffs by using an outer code whose non-local connectivity is supplied by logical operations of an inner code rather than directly by hardware. Prior works showed that this can reduce memory overhead for local low-rate inner codes such as the surface code. Here, we study concatenation over non-local, high-rate inner codes. Such inner codes experience correlated errors among the many logical qubits in a single codeblock. We handle this by treating each block as a single logical Galois qudit, enabling concatenation with algebraic outer codes with excellent parameters and, crucially, list decoders. In particular, we consider a memory system formed by concatenating quantum Reed-Solomon outer codes over the gross code. For fault-tolerant syndrome extraction, we develop a Galois qudit Shor scheme using "time-like" Reed-Solomon protection against measurement errors. Interestingly, a lightweight fault tolerance scheme, that would fail for qubits, works well for large-alphabet qudits, suggesting a very different theory of fault tolerance for such qudits. The whole protocol is optimised via improved bicycle instruction logical error rates, novel compilation strategies, and recent decoder post-selection rules. At uniform $10^{-3}$ physical noise, the concatenated gross code reaches the teraquop regime, which it previously could not access, with a lower space overhead than the $288$-qubit two-gross code, while offering several advantages from the engineering standpoint. Beyond our main case study, we believe the core ideas of Galois qudits, quantum Reed-Solomon outer codes, and list decoding, will prove generically powerful and highly transferable ideas across high-rate quantum architectures.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

Evolutionary Discovery of Bivariate Bicycle Codes with LLM-Guided Search

Quantum LDPC code discovery requires searching large algebraic design spaces while reliably certifying the parameters and equivalence classes of any candidates found. We introduce an LLM-guided evolutionary workflow in which language models mutate Python programs that generate bivariate-bicycle and perturbed bivariate-bicycle code ansätze. Across five campaigns, the system performed approximately 1{,}650 evolutionary iterations, screened about $2 \times 10^5$ candidate codes, and required ${\sim}140$ hours of computation and ${\sim}$US\$400 in LLM inference cost. Candidate codes are evaluated through a staged validation pipeline combining $\mathrm{GF}(2)$ rank computation, distance estimation and certification, mixed-integer linear programming, BLISS Tanner-graph deduplication, decomposability analysis, and local-Clifford equivalence checks. At block length $n \leq 360$, the workflow identifies 465 distinct candidate codes: 97 CSS bivariate-bicycle codes and 368 non-CSS perturbed variants. The CSS search recovers known high-performing codes and finds new finite-length representatives, including an indecomposable [[288,16,12]] code and higher-weight codes with up to $k = 50$ at distance $d = 8$. The non-CSS search produces perturbed codes matching the gross-code figure of merit at [[144,12,12]], along with additional high-distance candidates reported as certified values or upper bounds according to MILP status. Overall, these results show that LLM-guided program evolution can serve as a practical tool for structured quantum-code discovery when paired with independent evaluation.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Fail fast: techniques to probe rare events in quantum error correction

The ultimate goal of quantum error correction is to create logical qubits with very low error rates (e.g. 1e-12) and assemble them into large-scale quantum computers capable of performing many (e.g. billions) of logical gates on many (e.g. thousands) of logical qubits. However, it is necessarily difficult to directly assess the performance of such high-quality logical qubits using standard Monte Carlo sampling because logical failure events become very rare. Building on existing approaches to this problem, we develop three complementary techniques to characterize the rare-event regime for general quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes under circuit noise. (I) We propose a well-motivated, low-parameter ansatz for the failure spectrum (the fraction of fault sets of each size that fail) that empirically fits all the QEC systems we studied and predicts logical error rates at all physical error rates. (II) We find min-weight logical operators of syndrome measurement circuits and exactly compute the number of min-weight failing configurations. (III) We generalize the splitting method to qLDPC codes using multi-seeded Metropolis sampling to improve convergence for systems with many inequivalent logical operators. We apply these tools to distance-6, -12, and -18 bivariate bicycle codes under circuit noise, observing strong low-error-rate performance with the recently proposed Relay decoder but also considerable scope for further improvement.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Improved QLDPC Surgery: Logical Measurements and Bridging Codes

In this paper, we introduce the gauge-fixed QLDPC surgery scheme, an improved logical measurement scheme based on the construction of Cohen et al. (Sci. Adv. 8, eabn1717). Our scheme leverages expansion properties of the Tanner graph to substantially reduce the space overhead of QLDPC surgery. In certain cases, we only require $Θ(w)$ ancilla qubits to fault-tolerantly measure a weight $w$ logical operator. We provide rigorous analysis for the code distance and fault distance of our schemes, and present a modular decoding algorithm that achieves maximal fault-distance. We further introduce a bridge system to facilitate fault-tolerant joint measurements of logical operators. Augmented by this bridge construction, our scheme can be used to connect different families of QLDPC codes into one universal architecture. Applying our toolbox, we show how to perform all logical Clifford gates on the [[144,12,12]] bivariate bicycle code. Our scheme adds 103 ancilla qubits into the connectivity graph, and one of the twelve logical qubits is used as an ancilla for gate synthesis. Logical measurements are combined with the automorphism gates studied by Bravyi et al. (Nature 627, 778-782) to implement 288 Pauli product measurements. We demonstrate the practicality of our scheme through circuit-level noise simulations, leveraging our proposed modular decoder that combines BPOSD with matching.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Non-Clifford and parallelizable fault-tolerant logical gates on constant and almost-constant rate homological quantum LDPC codes via higher symmetries

We study parallel fault-tolerant quantum computing for families of homological quantum low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes defined on 3-manifolds with constant or almost-constant encoding rate. We derive generic formula for a transversal $T$ gate of color codes on general 3-manifolds, which acts as collective non-Clifford logical CCZ gates on any triplet of logical qubits with their logical-$X$ membranes having a $\mathbb{Z}_2$ triple intersection at a single point. The triple intersection number is a topological invariant, which also arises in the path integral of the emergent higher symmetry operator in a topological quantum field theory: the $\mathbb{Z}_2^3$ gauge theory. Moreover, the transversal $S$ gate of the color code corresponds to a higher-form symmetry supported on a codimension-1 submanifold, giving rise to exponentially many addressable and parallelizable logical CZ gates. A construction of constant-depth circuits of the above logical gates via cup product cohomology operation is also presented for three copies of identical toric codes on arbitrary 3-manifolds. We have developed a generic formalism to compute the triple intersection invariants for 3-manifolds. We further develop three types of LDPC codes supporting such logical gates: (1) A quasi-hyperbolic code from the product of 2D hyperbolic surface and a circle, with almost-constant rate $k/n=O(1/\log(n))$ and $O(\log(n))$ distance; (2) A homological fibre bundle code with $O(1/\log^{\frac{1}{2}}(n))$ rate and $O(\log^{\frac{1}{2}}(n))$ distance; (3) A specific family of 3D hyperbolic codes: the Torelli mapping torus code, constructed from mapping tori of a pseudo-Anosov element in the Torelli subgroup, which has constant rate while the distance scaling is currently unknown. We then show a generic constant-overhead scheme for applying a parallelizable universal gate set with the aid of logical-$X$ measurements.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Tour de gross: A modular quantum computer based on bivariate bicycle codes

We present the bicycle architecture, a modular quantum computing framework based on high-rate, low-overhead quantum LDPC codes identified in prior work. For two specific bivariate bicycle codes with distances 12 and 18, we construct explicit fault-tolerant logical instruction sets and estimate the logical error rate of the instructions under circuit noise. We develop a compilation strategy adapted to the constraints of the bicycle architecture, enabling large-scale universal quantum circuit execution. Integrating these components, we perform end-to-end resource estimates demonstrating that an order of magnitude larger logical circuits can be implemented with a given number of physical qubits on the bicycle architecture than on surface code architectures. We anticipate further improvements through advances in code constructions, circuit designs, and compilation techniques.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Architectures for Heterogeneous Quantum Error Correction Codes

Quantum Error Correction (QEC) is essential for future quantum computers due to its ability to exponentially suppress physical errors. The surface code is a leading error-correcting code candidate because of its local topological structure, experimentally achievable thresholds, and support for universal gate operations with magic states. However, its physical overhead scales quadratically with number of correctable errors. Conversely, quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes offer superior scaling but lack, on their own, a clear path to universal logical computation. Therefore, it is becoming increasingly evident is becoming that there are significant advantages to designing architectures using multiple codes. Heterogeneous architectures provide a clear path to universal logical computation as well as the ability to access different resource trade offs. To address this, we propose integrating the surface code and gross code using an ancilla bus for inter-code data movement. This approach involves managing trade-offs, including qubit overhead, a constrained instruction set, and gross code (memory) routing and management. While our focus is on the gross-surface code architecture, our method is adaptable to any code combination and the constraints generated by that specific architecture. Motivated by the potential reduction of physical qubit overhead, an ever important feature in the realization of fault tolerant computation, we perform the first full system study of heterogeneous error-correcting codes, discovering architectural trade-offs and optimizing around them. We demonstrate physical qubit reductions of up to 6.42x when executing an algorithm to a specific logical error rate, at the cost of up to a 3.43x increase in execution time.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Flag Proxy Networks: Tackling the Architectural, Scheduling, and Decoding Obstacles of Quantum LDPC codes

Quantum error correction is necessary for achieving exponential speedups on important applications. The planar surface code has remained the most studied error-correcting code for the last two decades because of its relative simplicity. However, encoding a singular logical qubit with the planar surface code requires physical qubits quadratic in the code distance~($d$), making it space-inefficient for the large-distance codes necessary for promising applications. Thus, {\em Quantum Low-Density Parity-Check (QLDPC)} have emerged as an alternative to the planar surface code but require a higher degree of connectivity. Furthermore, the problems of fault-tolerant syndrome extraction and decoding are understudied for these codes and also remain obstacles to their usage. In this paper, we consider two under-studied families of QLDPC codes: hyperbolic surface codes and hyperbolic color codes. We tackle the three challenges mentioned above as follows. {\em First}, we propose {\em Flag-Proxy Networks (FPNs)}, a generalizable architecture for quantum codes that achieves low connectivity through flag and proxy qubits. {\em Second}, we propose a {\em greedy syndrome extraction scheduling} algorithm for general quantum codes and further use this algorithm for fault-tolerant syndrome extraction on FPNs. {\em Third}, we present two decoders that leverage flag measurements to decode the hyperbolic codes accurately. Our work finds that degree-4 FPNs of the hyperbolic surface and color codes are respectively $2.9\times$ and $5.5\times$ more space-efficient than the $d = 5$ planar surface code, and become even more space-efficient when considering higher distances. The hyperbolic codes also have error rates comparable to their planar counterparts.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Quantum computing with Qiskit

We describe Qiskit, a software development kit for quantum information science. We discuss the key design decisions that have shaped its development, and examine the software architecture and its core components. We demonstrate an end-to-end workflow for solving a problem in condensed matter physics on a quantum computer that serves to highlight some of Qiskit's capabilities, for example the representation and optimization of circuits at various abstraction levels, its scalability and retargetability to new gates, and the use of quantum-classical computations via dynamic circuits. Lastly, we discuss some of the ecosystem of tools and plugins that extend Qiskit for various tasks, and the future ahead.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Encoding a magic state with beyond break-even fidelity

To run large-scale algorithms on a quantum computer, error-correcting codes must be able to perform a fundamental set of operations, called logic gates, while isolating the encoded information from noise~\cite{Harper2019,Ryan-Anderson2021,Egan2021fault, Chen2022calibrated, Sundaresan2022matching, ryananderson2022implementing, Postler2022demonstration, GoogleAI2023}. We can complete a universal set of logic gates by producing special resources called magic states~\cite{Bravyi2005universal,Maier2013magic, Chamberland2022building}. It is therefore important to produce high-fidelity magic states to conduct algorithms while introducing a minimal amount of noise to the computation. Here, we propose and implement a scheme to prepare a magic state on a superconducting qubit array using error correction. We find that our scheme produces better magic states than those we can prepare using the individual qubits of the device. This demonstrates a fundamental principle of fault-tolerant quantum computing~\cite{Shor96}, namely, that we can use error correction to improve the quality of logic gates with noisy qubits. Additionally, we show we can increase the yield of magic states using adaptive circuits, where circuit elements are changed depending on the outcome of mid-circuit measurements. This demonstrates an essential capability we will need for many error-correction subroutines. Our prototype will be invaluable in the future as it can reduce the number of physical qubits needed to produce high-fidelity magic states in large-scale quantum-computing architectures.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

High-threshold and low-overhead fault-tolerant quantum memory

Quantum error correction becomes a practical possibility only if the physical error rate is below a threshold value that depends on a particular quantum code, syndrome measurement circuit, and decoding algorithm. Here we present an end-to-end quantum error correction protocol that implements fault-tolerant memory based on a family of LDPC codes with a high encoding rate that achieves an error threshold of $0.8\%$ for the standard circuit-based noise model. This is on par with the surface code which has remained an uncontested leader in terms of its high error threshold for nearly 20 years. The full syndrome measurement cycle for a length-$n$ code in our family requires $n$ ancillary qubits and a depth-7 circuit composed of nearest-neighbor CNOT gates. The required qubit connectivity is a degree-6 graph that consists of two edge-disjoint planar subgraphs. As a concrete example, we show that 12 logical qubits can be preserved for nearly one million syndrome cycles using 288 physical qubits in total, assuming the physical error rate of $0.1\%$. We argue that achieving the same level of error suppression on 12 logical qubits with the surface code would require nearly 3000 physical qubits. Our findings bring demonstrations of a low-overhead fault-tolerant quantum memory within the reach of near-term quantum processors.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Subsystem surface and compass code sensitivities to non-identical infidelity distributions on heavy-hex lattice

Logical qubits encoded into a quantum code exhibit improved error rates when the physical error rates are sufficiently low, below the pseudothreshold. Logical error rates and pseudothresholds can be estimated for specific circuits and noise models, and these estimates provide approximate goals for qubit performance. However, estimates often assume uniform error rates, while real devices have static and/or dynamic distributions of non-identical error rates and may exhibit outliers. These distributions make it more challenging to evaluate, compare, and rank the expected performance of quantum processors. We numerically investigate how the logical error rate depends on parameters of the noise distribution for the subsystem surface code and the compass code on a subdivided hexagonal lattice. Three notable observations are found: (1) the average logical error rate depends on the average of the physical qubit infidelity distribution without sensitivity to higher moments (e.g., variance or outliers) for a wide parameter range; (2) the logical error rate saturates as errors increase at one or a few "bad" locations; and (3) a decoder that is aware of location specific error rates modestly improves the logical error rate. We discuss the implications of these results in the context of several different practical sources of outliers and non-uniform qubit error rates.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Enabling Full-Stack Quantum Computing with Changeable Error-Corrected Qubits

Executing quantum applications with quantum error correction (QEC) faces the gate non-universality problem imposed by the Eastin-Knill theorem. As one resource-time-efficient solution, code switching changes the encoding of logical qubits to implement universal logical gates. Unfortunately, it is still unclear how to perform full-stack fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC) based on the changeable logical qubit. Specifically, three critical problems remain unsolved: a) how to implement the dynamic logical qubit on hardware; b) how to determine the appropriate timing for logical qubit varying; c) how to improve the overall system performance for programs of different features. To overcome those design problems, We propose CECQ, to explore the large design space for FTQC based on changeable logical qubits. Experiments on various quantum programs demonstrate the effectiveness of CECQ.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2022

Giallar: Push-Button Verification for the Qiskit Quantum Compiler

This paper presents Giallar, a fully-automated verification toolkit for quantum compilers. Giallar requires no manual specifications, invariants, or proofs, and can automatically verify that a compiler pass preserves the semantics of quantum circuits. To deal with unbounded loops in quantum compilers, Giallar abstracts three loop templates, whose loop invariants can be automatically inferred. To efficiently check the equivalence of arbitrary input and output circuits that have complicated matrix semantics representation, Giallar introduces a symbolic representation for quantum circuits and a set of rewrite rules for showing the equivalence of symbolic quantum circuits. With Giallar, we implemented and verified 44 (out of 56) compiler passes in 13 versions of the Qiskit compiler, the open-source quantum compiler standard, during which three bugs were detected in and confirmed by Qiskit. Our evaluation shows that most of Qiskit compiler passes can be automatically verified in seconds and verification imposes only a modest overhead to compilation performance.

cs.PL↗

arXiv2022

Matching and maximum likelihood decoding of a multi-round subsystem quantum error correction experiment

Quantum error correction offers a promising path for performing quantum computations with low errors. Although a fully fault-tolerant execution of a quantum algorithm remains unrealized, recent experimental developments, along with improvements in control electronics, are enabling increasingly advanced demonstrations of the necessary operations for applying quantum error correction. Here, we perform quantum error correction on superconducting qubits connected in a heavy-hexagon lattice. The full processor can encode a logical qubit with distance three and perform several rounds of fault-tolerant syndrome measurements that allow the correction of any single fault in the circuitry. Furthermore, by using dynamic circuits and classical computation as part of our syndrome extraction protocols, we can exploit real-time feedback to reduce the impact of energy relaxation error in the syndrome and flag qubits. We show that the logical error varies depending on the use of a perfect matching decoder compared to a maximum likelihood decoder. We observe a logical error per syndrome measurement round as low as $\sim0.04$ for the matching decoder and as low as $\sim0.03$ for the maximum likelihood decoder. Our results suggest that more significant improvements to decoders are likely on the horizon as quantum hardware has reached a new stage of development towards fully fault-tolerant operations.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2022

OpenQASM 3: A broader and deeper quantum assembly language

Quantum assembly languages are machine-independent languages that traditionally describe quantum computation in the circuit model. Open quantum assembly language (OpenQASM 2) was proposed as an imperative programming language for quantum circuits based on earlier QASM dialects. In principle, any quantum computation could be described using OpenQASM 2, but there is a need to describe a broader set of circuits beyond the language of qubits and gates. By examining interactive use cases, we recognize two different timescales of quantum-classical interactions: real-time classical computations that must be performed within the coherence times of the qubits, and near-time computations with less stringent timing. Since the near-time domain is adequately described by existing programming frameworks, we choose in OpenQASM 3 to focus on the real-time domain, which must be more tightly coupled to the execution of quantum operations. We add support for arbitrary control flow as well as calling external classical functions. In addition, we recognize the need to describe circuits at multiple levels of specificity, and therefore we extend the language to include timing, pulse control, and gate modifiers. These new language features create a multi-level intermediate representation for circuit development and optimization, as well as control sequence implementation for calibration, characterization, and error mitigation.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2021

Calibrated decoders for experimental quantum error correction

Arbitrarily long quantum computations require quantum memories that can be repeatedly measured without being corrupted. Here, we preserve the state of a quantum memory, notably with the additional use of flagged error events. All error events were extracted using fast, mid-circuit measurements and resets of the physical qubits. Among the error decoders we considered, we introduce a perfect matching decoder that was calibrated from measurements containing up to size-4 correlated events. To compare the decoders, we used a partial post-selection scheme shown to retain ten times more data than full post-selection. We observed logical errors per round of $2.2\pm0.1\times10^{-2}$ (decoded without post-selection) and $5.1\pm0.7\times10^{-4}$ (full post-selection), which was less than the physical measurement error of $7\times10^{-3}$ and therefore surpasses a pseudo-threshold for repeated logical measurements.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2021

Experimental implementation of non-Clifford interleaved randomized benchmarking with a controlled-S gate

Hardware efficient transpilation of quantum circuits to a quantum devices native gateset is essential for the execution of quantum algorithms on noisy quantum computers. Typical quantum devices utilize a gateset with a single two-qubit Clifford entangling gate per pair of coupled qubits, however, in some applications access to a non-Clifford two-qubit gate can result in more optimal circuit decompositions and also allows more flexibility in optimizing over noise. We demonstrate calibration of a low error non-Clifford Controlled-$\fracπ{2}$ phase (CS) gate on a cloud based IBM Quantum computing using the Qiskit Pulse framework. To measure the gate error of the calibrated CS gate we perform non-Clifford CNOT-Dihedral interleaved randomized benchmarking. We are able to obtain a gate error of $5.9(7) \times 10^{-3}$ at a gate length 263 ns, which is close to the coherence limit of the associated qubits, and lower error than the backends standard calibrated CNOT gate.

quant-ph↗