Programmable neutral atom arrays show great promise for fault-tolerant quantum computing. A dominant physical error on this platform is qubit leakage and loss, notably decay errors from the Rydberg state during two-qubit gates. Such leakage events are particularly detrimental as they propagate, generating correlated errors that severely degrade the effective error distance of quantum error correction codes. Here, we present a novel approach to address Rydberg decay errors leveraging measurement-based quantum computation. Our scheme strategically exploits the inherent geometric structure of topological cluster states and only uses final leakage detection information to locate propagated errors originating from Rydberg decay. This eliminates the need for complex and atom-species-specific midcircuit leakage detection, offering broader applicability, e.g., to the well-established Rb atom platform. We demonstrate a high error threshold of 3.65% per cz gate for pure Rydberg decay and achieve a favorable error distance d_{e}≈d. Our method compares favorably with state-of-the-art erasure conversion protocols in the subthreshold performance, offering comparable or marginally larger logical error rates while significantly reducing experimental overhead.
Programmable neutral atom arrays show great promise for fault-tolerant quantum computing. A dominant physical error on this platform is qubit leakage and loss, notably decay errors from the Rydberg state during two-qubit gates. Such leakage events are particularly detrimental as they propagate, generating correlated errors that severely degrade the effective error distance of quantum error correction codes. Here, we present a novel approach to address Rydberg decay errors leveraging measurement-based quantum computation. Our scheme strategically exploits the inherent geometric structure of topological cluster states and only uses final leakage detection information to locate propagated errors originating from Rydberg decay. This eliminates the need for complex and atom-species-specific midcircuit leakage detection, offering broader applicability, e.g., to the well-established Rb atom platform. We demonstrate a high error threshold of 3.65% per cz gate for pure Rydberg decay and achieve a favorable error distance d_{e}≈d. Our method compares favorably with state-of-the-art erasure conversion protocols in the subthreshold performance, offering comparable or marginally larger logical error rates while significantly reducing experimental overhead.
Qubit leakage and loss, particularly Rydberg-induced decay during two-qubit gates, pose significant challenges to fault-tolerant quantum computing with neutral atom arrays, as they propagate to correlated errors and degrade code distance. Here, we present a hardware-efficient scheme for addressing Rydberg decay using the SWAP-Leakage Reduction Circuit (SWAP-LRC) protocol, which leverages ancilla-data qubit swaps for in-line leakage mitigation. This strategy eliminates the need for atom-species-specific mid-circuit detection or additional ancillary qubits. Based on experimental detection capabilities, we present two specialized decoders. For detectable leakage/loss (e.g., in 171Yb), our Located Decoder achieves a high threshold of 2.33\% per CNOT gate and an improved error distance, significantly outperforming conventional Pauli error models. More interestingly, for scenarios where only one error type is detectable (e.g., atom loss for 87Rb), our Critical Decoder specifically targets and mitigates the most detrimental critical faults caused by correlated leakage, achieving an error distance comparable to standard Pauli errors. Our findings offer insights for handling complex non-Pauli errors for neutral atom quantum computation.
The central prerequisite of any fault-tolerant quantum architecture is a quantum memory: a block of encoded physical qubits whose logical state is actively preserved against noise across many rounds of error correction. In neutral-atom Rydberg arrays, realizing such a memory is obstructed not by the entangling gates themselves, which are already fast and high-fidelity, but by the auxiliary operations that a conventional error-correction cycle requires: mid-circuit fluorescence measurement, inter-zone atom transport, and locally focused single-qubit addressing. Each of these introduces latency, atom loss, or optical crosstalk that exceeds the cost of the underlying gates by orders of magnitude. These costs accumulate cycle after cycle, progressively degrading the very logical information the code is meant to protect. Here we propose a protocol that stabilizes a toric-code quantum memory without moving, measuring or local addressing atoms. The key is to use a three-species Rydberg atom array for the complete stabilizer cycle, including syndrome extraction, coherent correction, and ancilla reset, under global, species-selective laser pulses. Numerical simulation of a 4×4 rotated toric code shows a longer qubit lifetime when the physical error rate is below a pseudo-threshold p⋆≈0.034. The scheme offers a concrete, hardware-efficient route to topological quantum memory in neutral-atom platforms.
Neutral-atom arrays have recently emerged as a promising platform for quantum information processing.One important remaining roadblock for the large-scale application of these systems is the ability to perform error-corrected quantum operations.To entangle the qubits in these systems, atoms are typically excited to Rydberg states, which could decay or give rise to various correlated errors that cannot be addressed directly through traditional methods of fault-tolerant quantum computation.In this work, we provide the first complete characterization of these sources of error in a neutral-atom quantum computer and propose hardware-efficient, fault-tolerant quantum computation schemes that mitigate them.Notably, we develop a novel and distinctly efficient method to address the most important errors associated with the decay of atomic qubits to states outside of the computational subspace.These advances allow us to significantly reduce the resource cost for fault-tolerant quantum computation compared to existing, general-purpose schemes.Our protocols can be implemented in the near term using state-of-the-art neutral-atom platforms with qubits encoded in both alkali and alkaline-earth atoms.
We investigate the limits of quantum error correction (QEC) in neutral-atom processors approaching high-fidelity gates and fast cycle times. We show that shorter QEC cycles amplify platform-specific errors, notably Rydberg excitation hopping, and hinder decay of residual Rydberg population, leading to non-Markovian correlated errors that degrade logical performance. To address this, we introduce loss biasing, where spurious Rydberg excitations are rapidly converted into atom loss via mid-circuit ionization, transforming errors into erasure-like noise and suppressing their propagation. Loss biasing restores the fault-tolerant logical error scaling for intra-cycle Pauli errors; furthermore, we argue that when supported with loss-aware decoding, it can achieve the optimal scaling of erasures while enabling shorter QEC cycles with reduced hardware overhead. We outline an implementation using fast autoionization in alkaline-earth(-like) atoms, establishing loss biasing as a practical route toward fault-tolerant quantum computing with sub-millisecond QEC cycles.
Abstract Executing quantum algorithms on error-corrected logical qubits is a critical step for scalable quantum computing, but the requisite numbers of qubits and physical error rates are demanding for current experimental hardware. Recently, the development of error correcting codes tailored to particular physical noise models has helped relax these requirements. In this work, we propose a qubit encoding and gate protocol for 171 Yb neutral atom qubits that converts the dominant physical errors into erasures, that is, errors in known locations. The key idea is to encode qubits in a metastable electronic level, such that gate errors predominantly result in transitions to disjoint subspaces whose populations can be continuously monitored via fluorescence. We estimate that 98% of errors can be converted into erasures. We quantify the benefit of this approach via circuit-level simulations of the surface code, finding a threshold increase from 0.937% to 4.15%. We also observe a larger code distance near the threshold, leading to a faster decrease in the logical error rate for the same number of physical qubits, which is important for near-term implementations. Erasure conversion should benefit any error correcting code, and may also be applied to design new gates and encodings in other qubit platforms.
Quantum error correction (QEC) requires the execution of deep quantum circuits with large numbers of physical qubits to protect information against errors. Designing protocols that can reduce gate and space-time overheads of QEC is therefore crucial to enable more efficient QEC in near-term experiments. Multiqubit gates offer a natural path toward fast and low-depth stabilizer measurement circuits. However, they typically introduce high-weight correlated errors that can degrade the circuit-level distance, leading to slower scalings of the logical error probabilities. In this Letter, we show how to realize fast and efficient surface code stabilizer readout using only two singly controlled z gates acting simultaneously on two target qubits, i.e., two CZ_{2} gates-instead of four cz. We show that this scheme is fault tolerant and provide a blueprint for implementation in Rydberg atom arrays. We derive the time-optimal pulses implementing the gates and perform extensive QEC numerical simulations with Rydberg decay errors. Compared to the standard protocol using four cz gates, our scheme is faster, uses fewer gates, and crucially maintains fault tolerance with comparable logical error probabilities. Fault-tolerant generalizations of this scheme to biased and erasure-dominant noise models, as well as to other QEC codes such as quantum Low-Density Parity-Check codes, are also discussed.