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arXiv:2610.06697

Measurement-free Preparation of Surface-Code States with Digital-Analog Counterdiabatic Drivings

Shubham Kumar, Balaganchi A. Bhargava, Paolo A. Erdman, Anne-Maria Visuri, Jose D. Martın-Guerrero, Yolanda Vives-Gilabert, Enrique Solano, Narendra N. Hegade

quant-phSubmitted Oct 5, 2026• Announced Oct 6, 2026• 0 citations• Revised Oct 6, 2026 (v2)
v1 · Oct 5, 2026v2 · Oct 6, 2026
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Abstract

Preparing stabilizer-code states with shallow circuits is an important primitive for near-term quantum error correction in superconducting circuits, where logical-state initialization requires four-body stabilizer correlations from native one- and two-body controls. We introduce a digital-analog method for the preparation of surface-code ground-state manifolds. The method exploits a structural property of the adiabatic gauge potential, mapping stabilizer-local counterdiabatic terms to digital-analog blocks on the superconducting layout using fixed-angle two-qubit XY gates, single-qubit rotations, and analog exchange-interaction evolutions. The dressed blocks generate higher-order operators used as the variational ansatz to determine the counterdiabatic terms within the Sels-Polkovnikov adiabatic-gauge-potential framework. We benchmark checkerboard plaquette-stabilizer grids up to 4 x 4; the square-grid instances correspond to rotated surface codes, while the rectangular cases probe the scaling of the method. For all grids, the proposed method generates the dominant four-body counterdiabatic basis and, at short evolution times, substantially improves ground-state preparation compared with bare adiabatic evolution. We further generalize the construction to n x m stabilizer lattices and show that digital-analog synthesis can reduce the entangling depth by an order of magnitude. Together, these results establish a direct connection between stabilizer geometry, the structure of the counterdiabatic gauge potential, and digital-analog control for measurement-free preparation of stabilizer-code states on near-term superconducting architectures.

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Preparing stabilizer-code states with shallow circuits is an important primitive for near-term quantum error correction in superconducting circuits, where logical-state initialization requires four-body stabilizer correlations from native one- and two-body controls. We introduce a digital-analog method for the preparation of surface-code ground-state manifolds. The method exploits a structural property of the adiabatic gauge potential, mapping stabilizer-local counterdiabatic terms to digital-analog blocks on the superconducting layout using fixed-angle two-qubit XY gates, single-qubit rotations, and analog exchange-interaction evolutions. The dressed blocks generate higher-order operators used as the variational ansatz to determine the counterdiabatic terms within the Sels-Polkovnikov adiabatic-gauge-potential framework. We benchmark checkerboard plaquette-stabilizer grids up to 4 x 4; the square-grid instances correspond to rotated surface codes, while the rectangular cases probe the scaling of the method. For all grids, the proposed method generates the dominant four-body counterdiabatic basis and, at short evolution times, substantially improves ground-state preparation compared with bare adiabatic evolution. We further generalize the construction to n x m stabilizer lattices and show that digital-analog synthesis can reduce the entangling depth by an order of magnitude. Together, these results establish a direct connection between stabilizer geometry, the structure of the counterdiabatic gauge potential, and digital-analog control for measurement-free preparation of stabilizer-code states on near-term superconducting architectures.
We introduce a digital-analog quantum computing framework that enables counterdiabatic protocols to be implemented at constant circuit depth, allowing fast and resource-efficient quantum state preparation on current quantum hardware. Counterdiabatic protocols suppress diabatic excitations in finite-time adiabatic evolution, but their practical application is limited by the non-local structure of the required Hamiltonians and the resource overhead of fully digital implementations. Counterdiabatic terms can be expressed as truncated expansions of nested commutators of the adiabatic Hamiltonian and its parametric derivative. Here, we show how this algebraic structure can be efficiently realized in a digital-analog setting using commutator product formulas. Using native multi-qubit analog interactions augmented by local single-qubit rotations, this approach enables higher-order counterdiabatic protocols whose implementation requires a constant number of analog blocks for any fixed truncation order, independent of system size. We demonstrate the method for two-dimensional spin models and analyze the associated approximation errors. These results show that digital-analog quantum computing enables a qualitatively new resource scaling for counterdiabatic protocols and related quantum control primitives, with direct implications for quantum simulation, optimization, and algorithmic state preparation on current quantum devices.
Abstract Counterdiabatic driving can suppress diabatic losses during adiabatic ground state preparation. As its implementation necessitates the generation of an adiabatic gauge potential, which requires knowledge of the spectral gap of instantaneous Hamiltonians and involves highly non-local controls in many-body systems, local counterdiabatic driving with approximate adiabatic gauge potential has been widely adopted. In this work, using transverse-field Ising model as an example, we present an in-depth study of the performance of local counterdiabatic protocols and provide a closed-form analysis of ground-state-fidelity optimization. We then propose a two-stage protocol based on local counterdiabatic and simple local single-body control to further improve the performance. The practical implementation of these protocols does not require diagonalization of instantaneous Hamiltonians or spectral gaps, and only additional local single-body driving is involved. To benchmark their performance, we experimentally implement digitized adiabatic quantum evolution in a trapped-ion system. We characterize the quality of the prepared states and explore the scaling behavior with system size up to 14 qubits. Our demonstration of quantum shortcut to adiabaticity opens a path towards preparing ground states of complex systems with accessible local controls.
The Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA), whose design is underpinned by the adiabatic theorem, is one of the leading variational quantum algorithms for preparing the ground states of gauge theories. A recently proposed variant, DC-QAOA, incorporates counterdiabatic driving to accelerate the adiabatic process, reducing both circuit depth and runtime. In this work, we present a systematic analysis, from both theoretical and computational perspectives, of DC-QAOA and related counterdiabatic variants for preparing the ground state of the Schwinger model, the paradigmatic (1+1)-dimensional lattice gauge theory. Benchmarking these methods against standard QAOA, we show that counterdiabatic driving improves ground-state preparation while lowering circuit depth requirements. Our results establish counterdiabatic protocols as a practical route towards efficient quantum simulation of gauge theories.
Quantum algorithms offer a promising route toward computational advantage, but current implementations remain constrained by limited coherence and gate errors, making circuit complexity and noise sensitivity critical considerations. Here, we develop a shortcuts-to-adiabaticity strategy for molecular ground-state preparation and apply it to both digitized adiabatic quantum computing and the variational quantum eigensolver. In the adiabatic framework, we construct an approximate counterdiabatic (CD) Hamiltonian using a nested-commutator expansion. For the molecular systems considered, the CD correction accelerates state preparation and improves energy convergence in the fast-evolution regime, enabling a target accuracy to be reached with a lower implemented-operator count. In the variational setting, we introduce the adiabatic gauge ansatz ($\mbox{AGA}$), obtained by promoting the Pauli-string components generated by the approximate adiabatic gauge potential (AGP) to independent variational generators. We further propose a reduced variant, $\mbox{AGAR}$, that retains only Pauli generators with weight not larger than two, substantially reducing the ansatz size while maintaining competitive accuracy over the regimes considered. Benchmarks on LiH\mathrm{LiH}LiH and BeH2\mathrm{BeH}_2BeH2​ show that the proposed ansätze achieve accuracies competitive with established approaches such as UCCSD. Experiments on the \texttt{IBM\_basquecountry} superconducting quantum processor, together with simulations under depolarizing noise, show that the reduced CD-inspired ansatz yields smaller energy discrepancies than UCCSD under the noise conditions considered. Overall, our results demonstrate how AGP-inspired operator structures can be used to balance accuracy and implementation cost in molecular simulations on current noise-limited quantum hardware.
Preparing logical states is a constantly recurring primitive at the start of any surface-code-based quantum computation. The standard measurement-based protocol is expensive on neutral atoms, since measurements are orders of magnitude slower than gates and, on single-zone architectures, additionally require shuttling the atoms to a readout zone. In this work, we present a measurement-free, unitary preparation of surface-code Pauli eigenstates tailored to neutral atoms. A bidirectional stabilizer-expanding CNOT cascade grows the patch from its middle line outward in depth (d+3)/2(d{+}3)/2(d+3)/2, while retaining fault distance ddd in the protected error direction. Each layer maps to one collective atom move followed by a single global Rydberg pulse, with about one row pickup per two layers. We compile and simulate the resulting schedules with the open-source bloqade toolchain under a hardware-calibrated, circuit-level neutral-atom noise model. The bidirectional cascade achieves the lowest logical error rate at every distance, and is the only construction tested that operates below threshold for both logical states at the considered device-level noise.
In fault-tolerant quantum computation, the preparation of logical states is a ubiquitous subroutine, yet significant challenges persist even for the simplest states required. In the present work, we present a unitary, scalable, distance-preserving encoding scheme for preparing Pauli eigenstates in surface codes. Unlike previous unitary approaches whose fault-distance remains constant with increasing code distance, our scheme ensures that the protection offered by the code is preserved during state preparation. Building on strategies discovered by reinforcement learning for the surface-17 code, we generalize the construction to arbitrary code distances and both rotated and unrotated surface codes. The proposed encoding relies only on geometrically local gates, and is therefore fully compatible with planar 2D qubit connectivity, and it achieves circuit depth scaling as O(d)\mathcal{O}(d)O(d), consistent with fundamental entanglement-generation bounds. We design explicit stabilizer-expanding circuits with and without ancilla-mediated connectivity and analyze their error-propagation behavior. Numerical simulations under depolarizing noise show that our unitary encoding without ancillas outperforms standard stabilizer-measurement-based schemes, reducing logical error rates by up to an order of magnitude. These results make the scheme particularly relevant for platforms such as trapped ions and neutral atoms, where measurements are costly relative to gates and idling noise is considerably weaker than gate noise. Our work bridges the gap between measurement-based and unitary encodings of surface-code states and opens new directions for distance-preserving state preparation in fault-tolerant quantum computation.