Fast Unitary Preparation of Surface-Code Logical States on Neutral-Atom Hardware
Abstract
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, while retaining fault distance d 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.
Related
- Fault-tolerant and fully addressable unitary logical gates via round-robin sparsification
- Deterministic Universal Logical Gates for Finite-Energy GKP Qubits in Trapped Neutral Atoms
- Fault-Tolerant Logical Operations and Efficient State Preparation in Modular Quantum Architectures with Noisy Interfaces
- Hardware-Efficient Ground-State Preparation using Variational Imaginary-Time Majorana Evolution
- A Backend-Agnostic MWIS Kernel for Stochastic Unit Commitment with Neutral-Atom Hardware Validation
BibTeX
@misc{schmid2026fast,
title = {{Fast Unitary Preparation of Surface-Code Logical States on Neutral-Atom Hardware}},
author = {Ludwig Schmid and Robert Wille},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.20183},
eprint = {2609.20183},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20183},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Fast Unitary Preparation of Surface-Code Logical States on Neutral-Atom Hardware
AU - Ludwig Schmid
AU - Robert Wille
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/01
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.20183
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20183
AB - 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, while retaining fault distance d 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.
ER -