Erasure surface code circuit without mid-circuit erasure checks
Abstract
Quantum error correction (QEC) codes can correct twice as many erasure errors as Pauli errors. Because of this scaling advantage, there is significant interest in developing qubits whose dominant error channel can be converted into erasures via mid-circuit erasure checks. However, such erasure checks come with hardware overhead in practice. End-of-the-line three-state readout, in which one simultaneously measures a qubit's erasure status and computational state, is an alternative to mid-circuit erasure checks that is generally simpler to implement. In this work, we systematically study the conditions required to enable erasure performance---the doubled error-correction capacity---in the surface code with and without mid-circuit erasure checks. We introduce the moonwalking surface code, the time-reversal of the walking surface code, as a zero-overhead circuit with superior handling of leakage and erasure. Specifically, we show that it enables erasure-like logical error rate scaling when combined with three-state measurement if leaked qubits cause two-qubit gates to be skipped and an appropriate decoder is used. Our decoder, based on a branch-and-bound algorithm, specifically incorporates the noise structure of the skip-gate leaked-qubit effect.
Related
- Finite-blocklength classical communication over the quantum erasure channel with and without classical feedback
- Fast, high-fidelity erasure detection of dual-rail qubits with symmetrically coupled readout
- High-Dimensional Deterministic Secure Quantum Communication with Reed-Solomon Erasure Coding
- Quantum-State Oblivious Transfer over Quantum Erasure Channels
- General Quantum Circuit Framework for Extended Wigner’s Friend Scenarios: Logically and Causally Consistent Reasoning without Absolute Measurement Events
BibTeX
@misc{pavlovich2026erasure,
title = {{Erasure surface code circuit without mid-circuit erasure checks}},
author = {Margaret Pavlovich and Ivan Rojkov and Chen Wang and Shruti Puri},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2607.29443},
eprint = {2607.29443},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.29443},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Erasure surface code circuit without mid-circuit erasure checks
AU - Margaret Pavlovich
AU - Ivan Rojkov
AU - Chen Wang
AU - Shruti Puri
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/04
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2607.29443
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.29443
AB - Quantum error correction (QEC) codes can correct twice as many erasure errors as Pauli errors. Because of this scaling advantage, there is significant interest in developing qubits whose dominant error channel can be converted into erasures via mid-circuit erasure checks. However, such erasure checks come with hardware overhead in practice. End-of-the-line three-state readout, in which one simultaneously measures a qubit's erasure status and computational state, is an alternative to mid-circuit erasure checks that is generally simpler to implement. In this work, we systematically study the conditions required to enable erasure performance---the doubled error-correction capacity---in the surface code with and without mid-circuit erasure checks. We introduce the moonwalking surface code, the time-reversal of the walking surface code, as a zero-overhead circuit with superior handling of leakage and erasure. Specifically, we show that it enables erasure-like logical error rate scaling when combined with three-state measurement if leaked qubits cause two-qubit gates to be skipped and an appropriate decoder is used. Our decoder, based on a branch-and-bound algorithm, specifically incorporates the noise structure of the skip-gate leaked-qubit effect.
ER -