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Paper 1

Infinite Distance Extrapolation: How error mitigation can enhance quantum error correction

George Umbrarescu, Oscar Higgott, Dan E. Browne

Year

2026

Journal

arXiv preprint

DOI

arXiv:2603.11285

arXiv

2603.11285

Quantum error mitigation (QEM) and quantum error correction (QEC) are two research areas that are often considered as distinct entities, and the problem of combining the two approaches in a non-trivial way has only recently started to be explored. In this paper, we explore a paradigm at the intersection of the two, based on the error mitigation technique of Zero-Noise Extrapolation (ZNE), that uses the distance of an error correcting code as a noise parameter. This is distinct from some alternative approaches, as QEC is here used as a subroutine inside the QEM framework, while other proposals use QEM as a subroutine inside QEC experiments. Intuitively, we exploit the fact that a reduction in the physical noise level is analogous to an increase in the code distance, as both of them result in a decrease in the logical error rate. As such, the extrapolation to zero noise in the case of ZNE becomes comparable to the extrapolation to infinite distance in the case of this method. We describe how to calculate expectation values from a fault-tolerant computation, and we gain some analytical intuition for our ansatz choice. We explore the performance of the considered method to reduce the errors in a range of expectation values for a realistic circuit-level noise model and realistic device imperfections on the rotated surface code, and we particularly show that the performance of the method holds even in the case of non-stabiliser input states.

Open paper

Paper 2

Qubit-oscillator concatenated codes: decoding formalism & code comparison

Yijia Xu, Yixu Wang, En-Jui Kuo, Victor V. Albert

Year

2022

Journal

arXiv preprint

DOI

arXiv:2209.04573

arXiv

2209.04573

Concatenating bosonic error-correcting codes with qubit codes can substantially boost the error-correcting power of the original qubit codes. It is not clear how to concatenate optimally, given there are several bosonic codes and concatenation schemes to choose from, including the recently discovered GKP-stabilizer codes [Phys. Rev. Lett. 125, 080503 (2020)}] that allow protection of a logical bosonic mode from fluctuations of the mode's conjugate variables. We develop efficient maximum-likelihood decoders for and analyze the performance of three different concatenations of codes taken from the following set: qubit stabilizer codes, analog/Gaussian stabilizer codes, GKP codes, and GKP-stabilizer codes. We benchmark decoder performance against additive Gaussian white noise, corroborating our numerics with analytical calculations. We observe that the concatenation involving GKP-stabilizer codes outperforms the more conventional concatenation of a qubit stabilizer code with a GKP code in some cases. We also propose a GKP-stabilizer code that suppresses fluctuations in both conjugate variables without extra quadrature squeezing, and formulate qudit versions of GKP-stabilizer codes.

Open paper