This manuscript presents a methods-forward, operational protocol for evaluating whether any structured dependence remains in quantum-computing measurement records after explicit modeling of standard quantum and device-level mechanisms. Classical definiteness is defined at the record layer, and pre-record states are treated as predictive descriptions rather than as classical outcome facts. Within this operational stance, the protocol converts questions about outcome status and record formation into a falsifiable test program grounded in preregistered analysis rules and standard measurement telemetry. A locked null-model family is specified in advance, incorporating standard quantum dynamics together with documented device-level mechanisms including drift, correlated and non-Markovian noise, crosstalk proxies, and leakage indicators. The framework provides operational definitions, a conservative postulate set, preregistered endpoints, residual-adjudication criteria, negative controls, a fixed windowing discipline, and a bound-first reporting standard designed to yield informative constraints under null results. Any candidate contribution beyond the declared null family must appear as structured, reproducible residual dependence that survives the locked null family and the full residual-filter sequence. Version 4.4 refines the protocol specification, clarifies evidentiary boundaries, and strengthens the integration of the synthetic demonstration. The manuscript includes a fully specified classical simulation that executes the decision pipeline under controlled conditions. The synthetic study illustrates how the protocol classifies a bounded-null case, a measured-artifact case, a partial-artifact/unresolved-covariate case, an injected structured-residual case, and a failed-topology case. This demonstration establishes computational executability of the protocol and clarifies the behavior of the decision tree, but it does not constitute empirical evidence for any physical mechanism. Because the protocol relies only on standard measurement telemetry and preregistered analysis rules, it is directly implementable across contemporary quantum-computing platforms and does not depend on any single dataset, backend, or hardware realization. The manuscript is a specification paper: it defines a reproducible evidentiary framework for record-level claims, while large-scale empirical implementation, hardware benchmarking, and cross-platform replication remain subsequent studies.
This manuscript presents a methods-forward, operational protocol for evaluating whether any structured dependence remains in quantum-computing measurement records after explicit modeling of standard quantum and device-level mechanisms. Classical definiteness is defined at the record layer, and pre-record states are treated as predictive descriptions rather than as classical outcome facts. Within this operational stance, the protocol converts questions about outcome status and record formation into a falsifiable test program grounded in preregistered analysis rules and standard measurement telemetry. A locked null-model family is specified in advance, incorporating standard quantum dynamics together with documented device-level mechanisms including drift, correlated and non-Markovian noise, crosstalk proxies, and leakage indicators. The framework provides operational definitions, a conservative postulate set, preregistered endpoints, residual-adjudication criteria, negative controls, a fixed windowing discipline, and a bound-first reporting standard designed to yield informative constraints under null results. Any candidate contribution beyond the declared null family must appear as structured, reproducible residual dependence that survives the locked null family and the full residual-filter sequence. Version 4.4 refines the protocol specification, clarifies evidentiary boundaries, and strengthens the integration of the synthetic demonstration. The manuscript includes a fully specified classical simulation that executes the decision pipeline under controlled conditions. The synthetic study illustrates how the protocol classifies a bounded-null case, a measured-artifact case, a partial-artifact/unresolved-covariate case, an injected structured-residual case, and a failed-topology case. This demonstration establishes computational executability of the protocol and clarifies the behavior of the decision tree, but it does not constitute empirical evidence for any physical mechanism. Because the protocol relies only on standard measurement telemetry and preregistered analysis rules, it is directly implementable across contemporary quantum-computing platforms and does not depend on any single dataset, backend, or hardware realization. The manuscript is a specification paper: it defines a reproducible evidentiary framework for record-level claims, while large-scale empirical implementation, hardware benchmarking, and cross-platform replication remain subsequent studies.
TSR-Q-1 presents a preregistered and falsifiable experimental protocol designed to test for structured late-time coherence residuals in superconducting transmon qubits. The protocol does not treat generic recoherence, non-exponential decay, or non-Markovian behavior as evidence for the proposed framework, since such phenomena may arise from conventional open-system mechanisms. Instead, it targets a specific normalized temporal scaling law, tₙ/T₂ = nᵏ, with the preregistered theoretical value k* = 1.4706, corresponding to the first two target locations t₂/T₂ = 2.7714 and t₃/T₂ = 5.0310. If the associated amplitude-scaling hypothesis is retained, the predicted ratio is A₃/A₂ ≈ 0.551. The accompanying computational validation package develops the analysis pipeline through five stages: preliminary signal injection, blind null testing, blind injection-recovery, multi-qubit global-k inference, and sensitivity mapping. The synthetic null models include stretched-exponential decay, 1/f^α correlated noise, random-telegraph/TLS-like contributions, slow drift, white noise, and device-to-device variability. These simulations validate the detectability, specificity, and sensitivity of the proposed analysis procedure under the tested synthetic noise families. They do not constitute experimental evidence for the existence of the predicted physical effect. The next stage is a preregistered hardware implementation using superconducting qubits, with device-specific null calibration, blind analysis, systematic controls, held-out replication, and, ultimately, independent experimental replication.
This record contains a manuscript and supporting reproducibility materials for “Ledger-Valid Recovery Diagnostics for Quantum Computing: A Prespecified Sequential Audit for Claim-Limited Recovery Validation.” The paper proposes a methodological validation framework for quantum-computing recovery claims. Its central claim is that endpoint recovery success is necessary but not sufficient for a strong recovery claim when calibration failure, false-carrier acceptance, postselection artifacts, leakage, sentinel blindness, or hidden discard can carry failure modes out of view. The manuscript introduces a prespecified S0–S4 ledger audit that converts familiar diagnostic ingredients—label calibration, candidate recovery, false-carrier challenge tests, postselection/leakage accounting, and sentinel observability—into an ordered, claim-limiting taxonomy. A supportive recovery claim is permitted only when all required gates pass; otherwise, the first failed stage determines a lower claim ceiling and an interpretable failure class. The evaluation is based on synthetic endpoint-level validation suites rather than circuit-level simulation or hardware data. These suites test the behavior of the decision architecture under clean support, degraded observability, false-carrier artifacts, postselection/leakage artifacts, sentinel-blind cases, correlated artifacts, and adversarial overlap. The results show a strong specificity/sensitivity tradeoff: the full ledger protocol sharply reduces synthetic non-support supportive-call rates relative to endpoint-only reporting, but with substantial loss of mechanism-positive support sensitivity. The paper explicitly treats this as a conservative claim-validity architecture, not as a new quantum error-correcting code, new physical observable, hardware speedup, or proof of improved device performance. The supporting materials document the final synthetic validation protocol, endpoint definitions, decision-bound implementation, direction-aware threshold sensitivity analysis, latent-threshold eligibility analysis, mechanism-negative/latent-eligible boundary cases, and figure/table traceability. The archive is intended to support review of the manuscript’s aggregate numerical claims and methodological provenance. Hardware implementation, independent simulator validation, and full raw-event-ledger reproduction are identified as future extensions. Suggested keywords: quantum computing; quantum error correction; validation methodology; recovery diagnostics; leakage; postselection; benchmarking; synthetic validation; decision architecture; reproducibility.
Empirical scaling laws for the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) on near-term hardware are often motivated by noise-compounding arguments or circuit-structure heuristics. Such models are rarely evaluated under pre-specified failure criteria that prevent post-hoc rescue. This study reports an audit-disciplined attempt to construct and test a predictive scaling law for QAOA-based minimal cut set recovery in fault tree models. The workflow used hash-locked artifacts, pre-specified kill switches, one-time holdout evaluation, and explicit no-rerun and no-rescue rules at every phase boundary. The initial F²-grounded compounding specification failed its pre-specified identifiability gate (KS3). Under an anti-leakage filter applied to 108 candidate rescue terms, zero candidates recovered a passing α₁ slope while also adding explanatory power above the structural baseline. A pre-specified structure-dominated fallback model was then defined and fit. The fallback reproduced its locked training prediction pathway to machine precision, with maximum absolute prediction difference of 3.55 × 10⁻¹⁵. It then failed the locked 24-row transport holdout. Holdout RMSE was 5.2214 against a locked threshold of 0.3770, and all 24 residuals were positive, giving a two-sided sign-test p-value of 1.19 × 10⁻⁷. The mean log residual of 5.198 corresponds to approximately 180-fold underprediction on the linear scale. Post-failure diagnostics indicated lower-n domain shift with standardized mean difference of −2.27 and four holdout rows with G_2q below the training range. By design, these diagnostics were explanatory only and did not authorize rescue, refit, reweighting, row removal, or threshold revision. The results do not support a deployable scaling law on the present corpus. Instead, they demonstrate that pre-specified audit controls can convert an attempted positive scaling-law claim into a reproducible falsification result with clear claim boundaries. The audit framework, the locked failure chain, and the allowed-and-forbidden claim boundary together constitute the paper's contribution. The work is offered as a methodological reference for future QAOA-on-hardware scaling studies.
This preregistration describes a confirmatory study of an upstream conditioning architecture in a quantum error-correction workflow. The project’s purpose is to test whether an intervention applied prior to the primary decoder produces a real and reproducible decoder-relevant effect, remains compatible with more than one downstream decoder family, generates a measurable exposed-observable statistical footprint, and improves or preserves performance across a preregistered regime rather than only at a single operating point. The study is intentionally limited to architecture-level evaluation, with the public claim set confined to exposed observables, frozen transformations, preregistered statistical tests, explicit negative controls, and bounded interpretation rules. The confirmatory design is organized around five preregistered tests: category existence, decoder compatibility, structural footprint, observable statistical signature, and regime robustness. Across these tests, the central comparison is between a baseline control pipeline and a conditioned pipeline in which the upstream intervention is applied while all non-conditioning settings are held fixed. The study uses frozen observables and frozen execution rules, including matched seeds, shot counts, code distances, physical error rates, geometry, and baseline decoder settings, so that any supported effect can be interpreted as evidence about the architecture under test rather than as a byproduct of post hoc tuning. To preserve a clean-room boundary, the registration restricts primary analysis to exposed, decoder-facing quantities only. These include logical failure, an exposed defect-count summary, and an exposed decoder-difficulty proxy, along with a locked scalar error-load construction derived from control-only standardization. The study does not rely on decoder-internal state variables, hidden confidence traces, or implementation-specific internal diagnostics in its primary confirmatory analyses. This structure is intended to let readers evaluate whether the architecture leaves a reproducible footprint in decoder-facing behavior without disclosing reconstruction-level mechanism details. Expected outcomes are defined in confirmatory rather than speculative terms. If the preregistered hypotheses are supported, the study is expected to provide evidence that an upstream conditioning intervention exists as a real architectural category in QEC, acts before the primary decoder, is compatible with downstream decoding, changes decoder-relevant exposed structure, and produces a reproducible observable statistical footprint in logical-failure behavior. If support is absent, mixed, or null, those outcomes will still be recorded under the frozen rules without rescue through post hoc metric changes, reweighting, or reinterpretation. In either case, the expected result of the registration is a bounded, auditable public record of whether this architecture class shows reproducible category-level behavior under a preregistered confirmatory design. The preregistration is not intended to establish a unique mechanism identity, identify a privileged implementation, disclose implementation-specific reconstruction details, or support claims about exact targeting logic, suppression laws, subset-sizing logic, telemetry-governed control, or broader cross-domain theory narratives. Public-facing interpretation is therefore intentionally limited to category validation and exposed-observable behavior. This is meant to support rigorous public evaluation while preserving strict clean-room limits around protected implementation detail.
This paper argues that the quantum measurement problem is not a single explanatory gap but a collection of distinct tasks. We separate detector representability, probability structure, single-event actuality, and outcome-conditioned refinement, and distinguish all four from causal registration, the physical criterion by which an already-instantiated event becomes a completed measurement record. These are explanatory roles within one measurement phenomenon rather than successive temporal stages. The analysis begins from the contrast between a global quantum description containing several detector-correlated components and the single entry that appears in a realized measurement history. Rather than compressing this contrast into an unexplained transition often labeled “collapse,” we ask which specific explanatory constraints must be satisfied before the relation between the two descriptions can be diagnosed precisely. A finite-resolution alternating position–momentum history is used throughout to separate questions of record formation, probability, actuality, causal registration, and outcome-conditioned refinement. A continuum analysis shows that making the registered history arbitrarily dense does not by itself recover a classical trajectory. Several parts of the architecture are exact once their inputs are specified. A detector representation induces an exact quotient; a specified acquisition channel and record family induce system-side effects; and a specified quantum instrument determines a family of subnormalized conditional branches before any one outcome is instantiated. Given a realized outcome label, the same instrument determines the corresponding normalized outcome-conditioned state. A finite-dimensional acquisition model explicitly realizes the representability chain, while a record-algebra indistinguishability result shows that removing coherence between detector-record sectors can leave all expectation values in the lifted record algebra unchanged even when that coherence remains detectable in a richer context. These results sharpen, but do not dissolve, the measurement problem. Record structure does not derive Born weights; a probability law does not itself constitute the event realized in one run; a mathematically available conditional branch family does not select one branch condition as actual; and causal onset, stabilization, registration, and conditional refinement all presuppose or follow that event rather than produce it. The resulting constraint audit tests—without assuming—the hypothesis that global quantum multiplicity and detector-record definiteness may belong to different representational levels. The main conclusion is not a new collapse dynamics but a localization of the remaining explanatory burden. Once representability, probability, causal registration, and conditional refinement are assigned their proper roles, the unresolved actuality transition can no longer be hidden inside the single label “collapse.” In the typed measurement architecture considered here, no pre-event operation has the mathematical role of producing an individual event token without additional event-producing structure. This is version 1.0 of the manuscript.
Structured quantum circuits are often represented by low-dimensional records such as occupation numbers or constraint feasibility rather than by full outcome distributions. A record loses control-dependent information when it merges outcomes whose probabilities respond differently to circuit parameters. We assess this loss without assuming a parametric hardware-noise model. Quantum Fisher information bounds premeasurement sensitivity; Fisher metrics of measurements and recorded statistics describe device-attainable sensitivity. For finite control changes, a Hellinger residual measures the response removed by a record, while its local quadratic term is the conditional covariance of the full-outcome score. Simultaneous confidence bounds support approval, refusal, or deferral.
We prove a finite-library completion theorem: executable augmentations terminate either with a record preserving every declared response or with proof that no library augmentation removes the loss. For an analytic control germ, integral closures characterize preservation along every analytic control arc, and finitely many Rees valuations detect failure. This connects the state--measurement--record chain to an executable completion-or-refusal procedure, an attainable-Fisher kernel criterion, and finite-sample decisions.
A three-qubit calculation separates measurement loss from record loss. Prospectively fixed IBM Kingston and Marrakesh experiments test decisions in four-qubit fixed-particle-number and GHZ families, including negative controls. In two-epoch IQM Garnet data, median record-level drift is 0.0797 times full-distribution drift, but a significant residual remains in 35 of 36 settings. On these circuits, the rules detect loss and approve records only within stated tolerances; they do not establish universal compression performance or device quantum Fisher information.