arXiv subjects

Kaavya Sahay

Publications and source records attributed to Kaavya Sahay.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Walking Floquet code circuits for zero-overhead leakage reduction

Leakage, occurring when a qubit undetectably exits the computational subspace, poses a significant challenge for quantum error correction by inducing correlated errors in space and time. These correlations reduce both the code threshold and the effective code distance. To address this challenge, we introduce two zero-overhead walking circuits for the honeycomb Floquet code (hFC), termed the swirling and sliding circuits, which periodically remove leakage while dynamically protecting logical qubits via a schedule of anticommuting two-body measurements. Unlike previous dynamic circuits for the hFC, ours preserves the distance to Pauli errors. We further study their performance under leakage and find that, for two leakage noise models, they may correct as many leakage errors as Pauli errors, improving on the more widely known walking surface code. Through numerical simulation, we observe that finite-error-rate performance under leakage is strongly influenced by entropic effects, producing a pronounced waterfall regime in which the logical error rate decreases much more rapidly with physical error rate than the expected distance-limited scaling. In this regime, even when asymptotic predictions suggest otherwise, the hFC can outperform the same-distance walking surface code in error rates and sub-threshold logical error scaling.

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arXiv2026

Architecting Early Fault Tolerant Neutral Atoms Systems with Quantum Advantage

Recent advancements in neutral atom platforms have enabled exploration of early fault-tolerant (FT) architectures for applications with quantum advantage, such as quantum dynamics simulations. An efficient fault-tolerant architecture has both spatially efficient quantum error correction codes (low qubit overhead), and efficient methodologies (transversal based gates, extractor based gates, etc.) for logical computation, to minimize overall execution time. Achieving the right balance between space and time can be critical for enabling early FT demonstrations of quantum advantage. In this work, we identify bottlenecks in existing spatially efficient schemes, which tend to be very serial, and do not take advantage of unutilized space. We introduce a teleportation-based scheme that leverages the reconfigurable connectivity of neutral atoms to parallelize logical operations. Our approach achieves up to \textbf{$\mathbf{\sim 3 \times}$ speedup} over extractor architectures at no extra space cost and achieves the best spacetime performance among other viable architectures before accounting for external \textit{resource-states}. To rigorously evaluate performance, we construct explicit quantum advantage benchmarks and \textit{simulate} compilation to a fault-tolerant instruction set, including low-level gate scheduling and shuttling patterns, and resource-state nondeterminism. We find that our speedups still apply and report exact space-time cost along with success probabilities, identifying architectures capable of achieving quantum advantage \textbf{with as little as $\mathbf{11,495}$ atoms and a runtime of $\mathbf{\sim 15}$ hours}.

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arXiv2026

A matching decoder for bivariate bicycle codes

The discovery of new quantum error-correcting codes that encode several logical qubits into relatively few physical qubits motivates the development of efficient and accurate methods of decoding these systems. Here, we adopt the minimum-weight perfect matching algorithm, a subroutine invaluable to decoding topological codes, to decode bivariate bicycle codes. Using the equivalence of bivariate bicycle codes to copies of the toric code, we propose a method we call the `cylinder trick' to rapidly find a correction using matching on code symmetries. We benchmark our decoder on the gross code family, cyclic hypergraph-product codes, generalized toric codes, and recently proposed directional codes under code capacity and phenomenological noise models, demonstrating the general applicability of our protocol. For a subset of these codes, we find that our decoder can be significantly improved by augmenting matching with strategies including belief propagation and `over-matching', thus achieving performance competitive with state-of-the-art approaches.

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arXiv2025

Fold-transversal surface code cultivation

Magic state cultivation is a state-of-the-art protocol to prepare ultra-high fidelity non-Clifford resource states for universal quantum computation. It offers a significant reduction in spacetime overhead compared to traditional magic state distillation techniques. Cultivation protocols involve measuring a transversal logical Clifford operator on an initial small-distance code and then rapidly growing to a larger-distance code. In this work, we present a new cultivation scheme in which we measure the fold-transversal Hadamard of the unrotated surface code, and leverage unitary techniques to grow within the surface code family. Using both stabilizer and state vector simulations we find that this approach achieves the lowest known spacetime overhead for magic state cultivation. Practical implementation of our protocol is best suited to architectures with non-local connectivity, showing the strength of architectures where such connectivity is readily available.

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arXiv2024

Error correction of transversal CNOT gates for scalable surface code computation

Recent experimental advances have made it possible to implement logical multi-qubit transversal gates on surface codes in a multitude of platforms. A transversal controlled-NOT (tCNOT) gate on two surface codes introduces correlated errors across the code blocks and thus requires modified decoding strategies compared to established methods of decoding surface code quantum memory (SCQM) or lattice surgery operations. In this work, we examine and benchmark the performance of three different decoding strategies for the tCNOT for scalable, fault-tolerant quantum computation. In particular, we present a low-complexity decoder based on minimum-weight perfect matching (MWPM) that achieves the same threshold as the SCQM MWPM decoder. We extend our analysis with a study of tailored decoding of a transversal teleportation circuit, along with a comparison between the performance of lattice surgery and transversal operations under Pauli and erasure noise models. Our investigation works towards systematic estimation of the cost of implementing large-scale quantum algorithms based on transversal gates in the surface code.

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arXiv2024

Surface Code with Imperfect Erasure Checks

Recently, a lot of effort has been devoted towards designing erasure qubits in which dominant physical noise excites leakage states whose population can be detected and returned to the qubit subspace. Interest in these erasure qubits has been driven by studies showing that the requirements for fault-tolerant quantum error correction are significantly relaxed when noise in every gate operation is dominated by erasures. However, these studies assume perfectly accurate erasure checks after every gate operation which generally come with undesirable time and hardware overhead costs. In this work, we investigate the consequences of using an imperfect but overhead-efficient erasure check for fault-tolerant quantum error correction with the surface code. We show that, under physically reasonable assumptions on the imperfect erasure checks, the threshold error rate is still at least over twice that for Pauli noise. We also study the impact of imperfect erasure checks on the effective error distance and find that it degrades the effective distance under a general error model in which a qubit suffers from depolarizing noise when interacting with a leaked qubit. We then identify a more restrictive but realistic noise model for a qubit that interacts with a leaked qubit, under which the effective error distance is twice that for Pauli noise. We apply our analysis to recently proposed superconducting dual-rail erasure qubits and show that achieving good performance surface code quantum memories with relaxed system requirements is possible.

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arXiv2023

Dual-rail encoding with superconducting cavities

The design of quantum hardware that reduces and mitigates errors is essential for practical quantum error correction (QEC) and useful quantum computation. To this end, we introduce the circuit-Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) dual-rail qubit in which our physical qubit is encoded in the single-photon subspace of two superconducting microwave cavities. The dominant photon loss errors can be detected and converted into erasure errors, which are in general much easier to correct. In contrast to linear optics, a circuit-QED implementation of the dual-rail code offers unique capabilities. Using just one additional transmon ancilla per dual-rail qubit, we describe how to perform a gate-based set of universal operations that includes state preparation, logical readout, and parametrizable single and two-qubit gates. Moreover, first-order hardware errors in the cavities and the transmon can be detected and converted to erasure errors in all operations, leaving background Pauli errors that are orders of magnitude smaller. Hence, the dual-rail cavity qubit exhibits a favorable hierarchy of error rates and is expected to perform well below the relevant QEC thresholds with today's coherence times.

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arXiv2023

High threshold codes for neutral atom qubits with biased erasure errors

The requirements for fault-tolerant quantum error correction can be simplified by leveraging structure in the noise of the underlying hardware. In this work, we identify a new type of structured noise motivated by neutral atom qubits, biased erasure errors, which arises when qubit errors are dominated by detectable leakage from only one of the computational states of the qubit. We study the performance of this model using gate-level simulations of the XZZX surface code. Using the predicted erasure fraction and bias of metastable $^{171}$Yb qubits, we find a threshold of 8.2% for two-qubit gate errors, which is 1.9 times higher than the threshold for unbiased erasures, and 7.5 times higher than the threshold for depolarizing errors. Surprisingly, the improved threshold is achieved without bias-preserving controlled-not gates, and instead results from the lower noise entropy in this model. We also introduce an XZZX cluster state construction for measurement-based error correction, hybrid-fusion, that is optimized for this noise model. By combining fusion operations and deterministic entangling gates, this construction preserves the intrinsic symmetry of the XZZX code, leading to a higher threshold of 10.3% and enabling the use of rectangular codes with fewer qubits. We discuss a potential physical implementation using a single plane of atoms and moveable tweezers.

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arXiv2023

Tailoring fusion-based error correction for high thresholds to biased fusion failures

We introduce fault-tolerant (FT) architectures for error correction with the XZZX cluster state based on performing measurements of two-qubit Pauli operators $Z\otimes Z$ and $X\otimes X$, or fusions, on a collection of few-body entangled resource states. Our construction is tailored to be effective against noise that predominantly causes faulty $X\otimes X$ measurements during fusions. This feature offers practical advantage in linear optical quantum computing with dual-rail photonic qubits, where failed fusions only erase $X\otimes X$ measurement outcomes. By applying our construction to this platform, we find a record high FT threshold to fusion failures exceeding $25\%$ in the experimentally relevant regime of non-zero loss rate per photon, considerably simplifying hardware requirements.

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arXiv2023

Minimising surface-code failures using a color-code decoder

The development of practical, high-performance decoding algorithms reduces the resource cost of fault-tolerant quantum computing. Here we propose a decoder for the surface code that finds low-weight correction operators for errors produced by the depolarising noise model. The decoder is obtained by mapping the syndrome of the surface code onto that of the color code, thereby allowing us to adopt more sophisticated color-code decoding algorithms. Analytical arguments and exhaustive testing show that the resulting decoder can find a least-weight correction for all weight $d/2$ depolarising errors for even code distance $d$. This improves the logical error rate by an exponential factor $O(2^{d/2})$ compared with decoders that treat bit-flip and dephasing errors separately. We demonstrate this improvement with analytical arguments and supporting numerical simulations at low error rates. Of independent interest, we also demonstrate an exponential improvement in logical error rate for our decoder used to correct independent and identically distributed bit-flip errors affecting the color code compared with more conventional color-code decoding algorithms.

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arXiv2022

A decoder for the triangular color code by matching on a Möbius strip

The color code is remarkable for its ability to perform fault-tolerant logic gates. This motivates the design of practical decoders that minimise the resource cost of color-code quantum computation. Here we propose a decoder for the planar color code with a triangular boundary where we match syndrome defects on a nontrivial manifold that has the topology of a Möbius strip. A basic implementation of our decoder used on the color code with hexagonal lattice geometry demonstrates a logical failure rate that is competitive with the optimal performance of the surface code, $\sim p^{α\sqrt{n}}$, with $α\approx 6 / 7 \sqrt{3} \approx 0.5$, error rate $p$, and $n$ the code length. Furthermore, by exhaustively testing over five billion error configurations, we find that a modification of our decoder that manually compares inequivalent recovery operators can correct all errors of weight $\le (d-1) /2$ for codes with distance $d \le 13$. Our decoder is derived using relations among the stabilizers that preserve global conservation laws at the lattice boundary. We present generalisations of our method to depolarising noise and fault-tolerant error correction, as well as to Majorana surface codes, higher-dimensional color codes and single-shot error correction.

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