This record bundles two engagement artifacts derived from the v1.4 register of the Trapped-Ion Ultrametric Testbed (10.5281/zenodo.22025544): (1) industry-brief-2026-08-20.md — "Why Measure Error Correlations Before Choosing a Code": a one-page brief answering whether the ultrametric quantum error-correction path is worth pursuing given its published independent-error threshold disadvantage (~55x below surface codes). The brief leads with the honest disclosure, frames the single falsifiable bet (error structure at scale is not independent), and offers four theory-neutral instruments (an 8-week trapped-ion probe, a laptop benchmark, an energy-audit template, and a QEC-Darwinism constraint checker). (2) correlated-error-benchmark-spec-2026-08-20.md — a pre-registered measurement protocol with six observables, five metrics, and three binding decision rules (including KILL-ULTRAMETRIC, which is binding on the program itself). The protocol is theory-neutral: the correlation metrics improve any code choice, ultrametric or not. Both artifacts are published as open engagement documents; the register's decision rules and kill-conditions are pre-registered. No hardware-advantage claim is made in either document.
This record bundles two engagement artifacts derived from the v1.4 register of the Trapped-Ion Ultrametric Testbed (10.5281/zenodo.22025544): (1) industry-brief-2026-08-20.md — "Why Measure Error Correlations Before Choosing a Code": a one-page brief answering whether the ultrametric quantum error-correction path is worth pursuing given its published independent-error threshold disadvantage (~55x below surface codes). The brief leads with the honest disclosure, frames the single falsifiable bet (error structure at scale is not independent), and offers four theory-neutral instruments (an 8-week trapped-ion probe, a laptop benchmark, an energy-audit template, and a QEC-Darwinism constraint checker). (2) correlated-error-benchmark-spec-2026-08-20.md — a pre-registered measurement protocol with six observables, five metrics, and three binding decision rules (including KILL-ULTRAMETRIC, which is binding on the program itself). The protocol is theory-neutral: the correlation metrics improve any code choice, ultrametric or not. Both artifacts are published as open engagement documents; the register's decision rules and kill-conditions are pre-registered. No hardware-advantage claim is made in either document.
Sixteen published records from a single research program, spanning December 2025 to August 2026, are here organized into one testable claim: trapped-ion quantum simulators are the first near-term platform on which ultrametric (p-adic) structure in quantum dynamics can be accepted or rejected by measurement, and passive, dissipation-structured hardware is the engineering embodiment of that structure. The synthesis contributes a falsifiability register: five observables, each with a pre-registered prediction, a kill-condition, and an apparatus already demonstrated in the cited records. It also records what the program has already ruled out, including the finding that generic Page-Wootters clock-rest coupling violates ultrametricity at a 29-35 percent rate while diagonal coupling yields exact ultrametric structure -- the very asymmetry the trapped-ion protocol measures -- and the economic finding that trapped ions rank last among seventeen platforms on a joules-per-solution basis, making the ion trap a physics testbed rather than a production economics play. The paper discloses its premise depth: the falsifiable content rests on two named imported inputs, and the claims end where those inputs begin. A practitioner section specifies what can be built today without any new theory.
Pre-registration, deposited before any outcome file of the dataset was analysed. It fixes the method and decision rules for an independent replication, with open-source Stim and PyMatching, of the surface-code scaling result in Google Quantum AI's dataset 10.5281/zenodo.6804040 (arXiv:2207.06431): R1 reproducing the provided PyMatching predictions; R2 whether distance-5 logical error per round is below the distance-3 average (Λ > 1) with data-fitted error models; R3 whether the abstract's per-cycle error rates are reproduced from the provided predictions of each decoder. Results will be published whichever way they fall.
A 20-chapter beginner's guide to quantum computing that starts with an honest question — why don't we have quantum computers yet? The guide teaches the standard curriculum accurately, explains why the standard approach faces a thermodynamic wall (a 20,000-fold cooling gap that is Carnot-limited), and introduces the ultrametric alternative: passive geometric fault tolerance on Bruhat-Tits trees, with DOI-registered evidence, computationally validated error thresholds 75 times higher than surface codes, and three falsifiable predictions. This is the v1.2 edition (August 2026). Five quantitative statements from the May 2026 edition are corrected, each verified by an independent computation deposited with this record (artifacts/verification/verify_guide_claims.py, 35 checks, all passing; see Appendix B). Appendix A records the research program's progress since May 2026, including a trapped-ion falsifiability register, an audit of a 2026 no-go theorem on quantum error correction and quantum Darwinism, and the program's own correction on prime-valuation readings of quantum codes. This deposit includes the complete source set: manuscript, HTML, PDF, references (BibTeX), citation audit, project plan, license, and verification artifacts. v1.2.1 (August 2026): post-publication audit corrections. Chapter 20's summary now lists seven open problems (including the QEC–Darwinism tradeoff); the LHC temperature comparison is marked approximate (95×, rounded); Appendix A correction #5 completed; the citation audit's internal-reference count corrected; open problem 7 carries its numeric bound (F_L > 0.874). No quantitative claims changed. v1.2.2 (August 2026): deposit-file corrections. LICENSE now contains the full CC BY 4.0 International legal code, and README.md is the deposit manifest (a project-blueprint README was attached in v1.2.1 by an automation error). No content changes.
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 deposit seals the baseline (v1.0) pre-registration of four experimentally testable predictions of the Triadic Entanglement State-Determination Engineering (TESE) framework, together with a shared-coupling back-inference protocol and pre-specified decision criteria. All four predictions derive from a single coupling set {g_AB} governing six fundamental modes of a first-space meta-field; confirmation of any one prediction, combined with back-inference of {g_AB} and consistency checks against the remaining three, constitutes system-level (global) confirmation rather than an isolated one. The predictions are: (M5-delta) a four-threshold decoherence staircase with threshold positions at 13.6 eV, 8.8 MeV, 939 MeV, and 200 MeV, plus six absorption peaks of an entanglement-medium response spectrum; (M5-gamma) a statistically significant deviation of the cosmological structure growth index from the general-relativistic scaling law, jointly with superior TESE-template fit over Lambda-CDM at pre-specified model-comparison thresholds; (M5-beta) vanishing of decoherence rates as temperature approaches zero, in contradiction with spontaneous-collapse models; and (M5-alpha) an upward shift of +9.6 percent in the hadron-quark transition temperature in neutron-star gravitational environments, with environment-independence of the crossover shape as an independent kill criterion. For each prediction we register the quantitative anchor value, the acceptance and rejection thresholds, the designated data source, and the axiomatic link that a conflict would localize. This v1.0 baseline is immutable; revisions follow a versioned chain under one concept DOI with explicit change logs. Companion frozen analysis code is deposited separately. No analysis choice in this document depends on post-registration information.
Quantum error correction is priced in combinatorial currency — rate, distance, threshold — while the physical cost of performing correction goes uncounted. Every cycle of active (measurement-based) error correction erases information: syndrome extraction, majority voting, and ancilla re-initialization each reset redundancy, and Landauer's principle prices each erasure at no less than kT·ln2 per bit. This paper derives the resulting thermodynamic floor for correction overhead — (n−k)/k · kT·ln2 per logical qubit per round for an [[n,k]] code — verifies its scaling across code families (linear for repetition, quadratic for surface, constant for constant-rate), and applies the JPCUB joules-per-correct-answer metric to rank correction architectures. A two-level nested (tree-structured) code is compared with flat Hamming codes of equal rate on a clustered NAND-like channel: hierarchical decoding cuts the per-round erasure count by a factor of 1.6 to 3, while the naive construction pays a residual-error penalty — a partial null that leaves the floor claim intact and defines the protocol for an industrial flash-memory test. Biological systems that run robust quantum processes without correction (photosynthetic energy transfer, radical-pair magnetoreception) show the floor is an architecture choice: structure prepays in capital energy what correction pays in operating erasures. Autonomous and dissipative correction is identified as the boundary of the claim. A closing section documents the 2026 quantum-algorithms-and-QEC curriculum snapshot: the energy bill the paper prices is absent from the field's own teaching materials as of 2026-08-26.