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arXiv:2603.00228

Stairway Codes: Floquetifying Bivariate Bicycle Codes and Beyond

Shoham Jacoby, Alex Retzker, Fernando Pastawski

quant-phSubmitted Feb 27, 2026• Announced Mar 3, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

Floquet codes define fault-tolerant protocols through periodic measurement sequences that drive a dynamically evolving stabilizer group. They provide a natural framework for hardware supporting two-qubit parity measurements but no unitary entangling gates. However, few known constructions achieve both high encoding rates and high thresholds. We close this gap by introducing Stairway codes, a family of high-rate Floquet protocols obtained by Floquetifying Abelian two-block group algebra codes, a class that includes the bivariate bicycle codes. By representing the static code as a foliated ZX-calculus network within a $(w{-}1)$-dimensional space-time lattice and rotating the time axis, we decompose its weight-$w$ stabilizers into a periodic sequence of pairwise measurements. This reduces the design of new codes within this family to the selection of favorable periodic boundary conditions. We identify instances with competitive parameters, analyze their distance under circuit-level noise, and demonstrate logical error rates surpassing those of other Floquet codes at comparable encoding rates. Remarkably, our construction requires fewer than 300 physical qubits to match the distance and encoding rate of semi-hyperbolic Floquet codes that use over 1300 qubits.

Comments
18 pages, 17 figures

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We construct families of Floquet codes derived from color-code tilings of closed hyperbolic surfaces. These codes have weight-two check operators, a finite encoding rate and can be decoded efficiently with minimum-weight perfect matching. We also construct semi-hyperbolic Floquet codes, which have improved distance scaling, and are obtained via a fine-graining procedure. Using a circuit-based noise model that assumes direct two-qubit measurements, we show that semi-hyperbolic Floquet codes can be 48 times more efficient than planar honeycomb codes and therefore over 100 times more efficient than alternative compilations of the surface code to two-qubit measurements, even at physical error rates of 0.3% to 1%. We further demonstrate that semi-hyperbolic Floquet codes can have a teraquop footprint of only 32 physical qubits per logical qubit at a noise strength of 0.1%. For standard circuit-level depolarizing noise at p=0.1% , we find a 30 times improvement over planar honeycomb codes and a 5.6 times improvement over surface codes. Finally, we analyze small instances that are amenable to near-term experiments, including a Floquet code derived from the Bolza surface that encodes four logical qubits into 16 physical qubits. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

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Floquet codes define fault-tolerant protocols through periodic measurement sequences that drive a dynamically evolving stabilizer group. They provide a natural framework for hardware supporting two-qubit parity measurements but no unitary entangling gates. However, few known constructions achieve both high encoding rates and high thresholds. We close this gap by introducing Stairway codes, a family of high-rate Floquet protocols obtained by Floquetifying Abelian two-block group algebra codes, a class that includes the bivariate bicycle codes. By representing the static code as a foliated ZX-calculus network within a (w−1)(w{-}1)(w−1)-dimensional space-time lattice and rotating the time axis, we decompose its weight-www stabilizers into a periodic sequence of pairwise measurements. This reduces the design of new codes within this family to the selection of favorable periodic boundary conditions. We identify instances with competitive parameters, analyze their distance under circuit-level noise, and demonstrate logical error rates surpassing those of other Floquet codes at comparable encoding rates. Remarkably, our construction requires fewer than 300 physical qubits to match the distance and encoding rate of semi-hyperbolic Floquet codes that use over 1300 qubits.
Abelian multicycle (AMC) codes are compact quantum low-density parity-check codes whose multiblock chain-complex structure provides redundant low-weight stabilizers and supports single-shot error correction. We introduce Floquet AMC codes by deriving a quotient-lattice representation of a general level-jjj, DDD-dimensional AMC complex over a finite Abelian group algebra, lifting this lattice to spacetime, and rotating the circuit-time direction in the associated ZX network. When the check and data spiders have even valence and admit a time-oriented local port matching, the network decomposes into a periodic schedule of native two-qubit XXXXXX and ZZZZZZ measurements. We construct generalized-bicycle and level-222 AMC4 examples, determine their instantaneous stabilizer groups, and compute their embedded distances by minimizing over all inequivalent circuit cuts. For AMC4 instances locally equivalent to four-dimensional toric codes, we obtain Floquet memories with parameters [[108,6,5]][[108,6,5]][[108,6,5]], [[144,6,8]][[144,6,8]][[144,6,8]], and [[324,6,10]][[324,6,10]][[324,6,10]]. Local Pauli-web detector templates and beam-search decoding under the measurement-native EM3 noise model yield an estimated pseudothreshold of approximately 1.2%1.2\%1.2%. These results provide compact measurement-only realizations of higher-dimensional homological redundancy without directly measuring the original weight-six stabilizers.
A central goal in quantum error correction is to reduce the overhead of fault-tolerant quantum computing by increasing noise thresholds and reducing the number of physical qubits required to sustain a logical qubit. We introduce a potential path towards this goal based on a family of dynamically generated quantum error correcting codes that we call "hyperbolic Floquet codes.'' These codes are defined by a specific sequence of non-commuting two-body measurements arranged periodically in time that stabilize a topological code on a hyperbolic manifold with negative curvature. We focus on a family of lattices for n qubits that, according to our prescription that defines the code, provably achieve a finite encoding rate ( 1 / 8 + 2 / n ) while still requiring only two-body measurements. Similar to hyperbolic surface codes, the distance of the code at each time-step scales at most logarithmically in n . The family of lattices we choose indicates that this scaling is achievable in practice. We develop and benchmark an efficient matching-based decoder that provides evidence of a threshold near 0.1% in a phenomenological noise model and 0.25% in an entangling measurements noise model. Utilizing weight-two check operators and a qubit connectivity of 3, one of our hyperbolic Floquet codes uses 400 physical qubits to encode 52 logical qubits with a code distance of 8, i.e., it is a [ [ 400 , 52 , 8 ] ] code. At small error rates, comparable logical error suppression to this code requires 5x as many physical qubits (1924) when using the honeycomb Floquet code with the same noise model and decoder.
Floquet codes are a recently discovered type of quantum error correction code.They can be thought of as generalising stabilizer codes and subsystem codes, by allowing the logical Pauli operators of the code to vary dynamically over time.In this work, we use the ZX-calculus to create new Floquet codes that are in a definable sense equivalent to known stabilizer codes.In particular, we find a Floquet code that is equivalent to the colour code, but has the advantage that all measurements required to implement it are of weight one or two.Notably, the qubits can even be laid out on a square lattice.This circumvents current difficulties with implementing the colour code fault-tolerantly, while preserving its advantages over other well-studied codes, and could furthermore allow one to benefit from extra features exclusive to Floquet codes.On a higher level, as in Ref. [BLN + 23], this work shines a light on the relationship between 'static' stabilizer and subsystem codes and 'dynamic' Floquet codes; at first glance the latter seems a significant generalisation of the former, but in the case of the codes that we find here, the difference is essentially just a few basic ZX-diagram deformations.
Erasure qubits reduce overhead in fault-tolerant quantum error correction (QEC) by converting dominant faults into detectable errors known as erasures. They have demonstrated notable improvements in thresholds and scaling in surface and Floquet code memories. In this work, we use erasure qubits on Bivariate Bicycle (BB) codes from the quantum low-density parity-check (QLDPC) regime. Owing to their sparse structure and favorable rate-distance trade-offs, BB codes are practical candidates for QEC. We introduce BiBiEQ, a novel framework that compiles a given BB code into an erasure-aware memory circuit C_E. This erasure circuit C_E comprises erasure checks (ECs), resets, and erasures spread over a user-specified erasure check schedule (2EC, 4EC). BiBiEQ converts this erasure circuit C_E into the stabilizer circuit C for general-purpose decoding. BiBiEQ provides two engines for this conversion, BiBiEQ-Exact and BiBiEQ-Approx. BiBiEQ-Exact preserves the joint-erasure correlations and serves as our accuracy benchmark, while BiBiEQ-Approx uses an independence approximation to accelerate large sweeps and expose accuracy-throughput trade-offs. Using BiBiEQ, we decode the stabilizer circuits to get a per-round logical error rate (LER) for the BB codes and quantify the effect of the EC schedules on the correctable operating region below the pseudo-threshold. The 4EC schedule keeps the accuracy of both engines close to one another, making BiBiEQ-Approx a reliable proxy for BiBiEQ-Exact for faster sweeps. Below the pseudo-threshold, the code distance (d) hop from distance (d) 6 to 10 yields a drop in LER by 10-17x larger than distance (d) 10 to 12, showing that most gains are realized by d=10.
The realization of quantum error correction protocols whose logical error rates are suppressed far below physical error rates relies on an intricate combination: the error-correcting code's efficiency, the syndrome extraction circuit's fault tolerance and overhead, the decoder's quality, and the device's constraints, such as physical qubit count and connectivity. This work makes two contributions towards error-corrected quantum devices. First, we introduce mirror codes, a simple yet flexible construction of LDPC stabilizer codes parameterized by a group GGG and two subsets of GGG whose total size bounds the check weight. These codes contain all abelian two-block group algebra codes, such as bivariate bicycle (BB) codes. At the same time, they are manifestly not CSS in general, thus deviating substantially from most prior constructions. Fixing a check weight of 6, we find [[60,4,10]],[[36,6,6]],[[48,8,6]][[ 60, 4, 10 ]], [[ 36, 6, 6 ]], [[ 48, 8, 6 ]][[60,4,10]],[[36,6,6]],[[48,8,6]], and [[85,8,9]][[ 85, 8, 9 ]][[85,8,9]] codes, all of which are not CSS; we also find several weight-7 codes with kd>nkd > nkd>n. Next, we construct syndrome extraction circuits that trade overhead for provable fault tolerance. These circuits use 1-2, 3, and 6 ancillae per check, and respectively are partially fault-tolerant (FT), provably FT on weight-6 CSS codes, and provably FT on \emph{all} weight-6 stabilizer codes. Using our constructions, we perform end-to-end quantum memory experiments on several representative mirror codes under circuit-level noise. We achieve an error pseudothreshold on the order of 0.2%0.2\%0.2%, approximately matching that of the [[144,12,12]][[ 144, 12, 12 ]][[144,12,12]] BB code under the same model. These findings position mirror codes as a versatile candidate for fault-tolerant quantum memory, especially on smaller-scale devices in the near term.
We construct families of Floquet codes derived from color-code tilings of closed hyperbolic surfaces. These codes have weight-two check operators, a finite encoding rate and can be decoded efficiently with minimum-weight perfect matching. We also construct semi-hyperbolic Floquet codes, which have improved distance scaling, and are obtained via a fine-graining procedure. Using a circuit-based noise model that assumes direct two-qubit measurements, we show that semi-hyperbolic Floquet codes can be 48 times more efficient than planar honeycomb codes and therefore over 100 times more efficient than alternative compilations of the surface code to two-qubit measurements, even at physical error rates of 0.3% to 1%. We further demonstrate that semi-hyperbolic Floquet codes can have a teraquop footprint of only 32 physical qubits per logical qubit at a noise strength of 0.1%. For standard circuit-level depolarizing noise at p=0.1% , we find a 30 times improvement over planar honeycomb codes and a 5.6 times improvement over surface codes. Finally, we analyze small instances that are amenable to near-term experiments, including a Floquet code derived from the Bolza surface that encodes four logical qubits into 16 physical qubits. Published by the American Physical Society 2024