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Paper 1

Detrimental non-Markovian errors for surface code memory

John F Kam, Spiro Gicev, Kavan Modi, Angus Southwell, Muhammad Usman

Year

2024

Journal

arXiv preprint

DOI

arXiv:2410.23779

arXiv

2410.23779

The realization of fault-tolerant quantum computers hinges on effective quantum error correction protocols, whose performance significantly relies on the nature of the underlying noise. In this work, we directly study the structure of non-Markovian correlated errors and their impact on surface code memory performance. Specifically, we compare surface code performance under non-Markovian noise and independent circuit-level noise, while keeping marginal error rates constant. Our analysis shows that while not all temporally correlated structures are detrimental, certain structures, particularly multi-time "streaky" correlations affecting syndrome qubits and two-qubit gates, can severely degrade logical error rate scaling. Furthermore, we discuss our results in the context of recent quantum error correction experiments on physical devices. These findings underscore the importance of understanding and mitigating non-Markovian noise toward achieving practical, fault-tolerant quantum computing.

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Paper 2

ADaPT: Adaptive-window Decoding for Practical fault-Tolerance

Tina Oberoi, Joshua Viszlai, Frederic T. Chong

Year

2026

Journal

arXiv preprint

DOI

arXiv:2605.01149

arXiv

2605.01149

Window decoding, first proposed to reduce decoding complexity for real-time decoding, is an essential component to realize scalable, universal-fault tolerant computation. Prior work has focused on improving throughput through parallelization and reducing reaction time via speculation on window boundaries. However, these methods use a fixed window size d, paying a fixed decoding time overhead for each window. In practice, we find this overhead of a fixed window size unnecessary in many cases due to the sparsity of average-case errors in QEC. Leveraging this insight, in this paper we propose an adaptive window decoding technique based on decoder confidence. This technique reduces the overhead in decoding time thus reducing reaction time without compromising on logical error rates. We benchmark adaptive window decoding across different codes and hardware inspired noise models. Our results show that this adaptive technique reaches the target error rate while maintaining a low decoding time overhead across different codes, and under different noise models.

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