Simulating Quantum Error Correction beyond Pauli Stochastic Errors

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Hines, Jordan, Ostrove, Corey, Rudinger, Kenneth, Seritan, Stefan, Young, Kevin, Blume-Kohout, Robin, Proctor, Timothy
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Hines, Jordan
Ostrove, Corey
Rudinger, Kenneth
Seritan, Stefan
Young, Kevin
Blume-Kohout, Robin
Proctor, Timothy
author_facet Hines, Jordan
Ostrove, Corey
Rudinger, Kenneth
Seritan, Stefan
Young, Kevin
Blume-Kohout, Robin
Proctor, Timothy
contents Quantum error correction (QEC), the lynchpin of fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC), is designed and validated against well-behaved Pauli stochastic error models. But in real-world deployment, QEC protocols encounter a vast array of other errors -- coherent and non-Pauli errors -- whose impacts on quantum circuits are vastly different than those of stochastic Pauli errors. The impacts of these errors on QEC and FTQC protocols have been largely unpredictable to date due to exponential classical simulation cost. Here, we show how to accurately and efficiently model the effects of coherent and non-Pauli errors on FTQC, and we study the effects of such errors on syndrome extraction for surface and bivariate bicycle codes, and on magic state cultivation. Our analysis suggests that coherent error can shift fault-tolerance thresholds, increase the space-time cost of magic state cultivation, and can increase logical error rates by an order of magnitude compared to equivalent stochastic errors. These analyses are enabled by a new technique for mapping any Markovian circuit-level error model with sufficiently small error rates onto a detector error model (DEM) for an FTQC circuit. The resulting DEM enables Monte Carlo estimation of logical error rates and noise-adapted decoding, and its parameters can be analytically related to the underlying physical noise parameters to enable approximate strong simulation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_18457
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Simulating Quantum Error Correction beyond Pauli Stochastic Errors
Hines, Jordan
Ostrove, Corey
Rudinger, Kenneth
Seritan, Stefan
Young, Kevin
Blume-Kohout, Robin
Proctor, Timothy
Quantum Physics
Quantum error correction (QEC), the lynchpin of fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC), is designed and validated against well-behaved Pauli stochastic error models. But in real-world deployment, QEC protocols encounter a vast array of other errors -- coherent and non-Pauli errors -- whose impacts on quantum circuits are vastly different than those of stochastic Pauli errors. The impacts of these errors on QEC and FTQC protocols have been largely unpredictable to date due to exponential classical simulation cost. Here, we show how to accurately and efficiently model the effects of coherent and non-Pauli errors on FTQC, and we study the effects of such errors on syndrome extraction for surface and bivariate bicycle codes, and on magic state cultivation. Our analysis suggests that coherent error can shift fault-tolerance thresholds, increase the space-time cost of magic state cultivation, and can increase logical error rates by an order of magnitude compared to equivalent stochastic errors. These analyses are enabled by a new technique for mapping any Markovian circuit-level error model with sufficiently small error rates onto a detector error model (DEM) for an FTQC circuit. The resulting DEM enables Monte Carlo estimation of logical error rates and noise-adapted decoding, and its parameters can be analytically related to the underlying physical noise parameters to enable approximate strong simulation.
title Simulating Quantum Error Correction beyond Pauli Stochastic Errors
topic Quantum Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.18457