Zeno-Enhanced Probabilistic Error Cancellation with Quantum Error Detection Codes
quant-ph
Submitted: 2026-05-12
Updated: 2026-10-13
Comments: 33 pages, 13 figures
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
The gist: Probabilistic error cancellation (PEC) is unbiased but suffers exponential sampling overhead set by noise-weighted circuit volume, whereas quantum error-detecting codes (QEDCs) remove many physical
Terminology
Abstract
Probabilistic error cancellation (PEC) is unbiased but suffers exponential sampling overhead set by noise-weighted circuit volume, whereas quantum error-detecting codes (QEDCs) remove many physical faults by stabilizer post-selection but leave an undetectable logical residue. We exploit this complementarity by using post-selection to map physical noise to a weaker accepted logical channel, and then applying PEC only to the residual channel. The resulting feedback-free QED+PEC scheme interleaves Clifford logical blocks, stabilizer measurements, post-selection, and probabilistic cancellation on accepted trajectories, without real-time decoding or active recovery. A key complication is that post-selection correlates accepted fault branches through stabilizer-commutation constraints, so the sparse Pauli-Lindblad factorization underlying bare PEC no longer applies directly. We therefore construct the inverse channel perturbatively: for fixed order K, only accepted fault branches up to order K are retained, reducing preprocessing from 2 m branches to O(m K) per block. The order- K protocol cancels the normalized post-selected channel through degree K, leaving a per-block error O(W K+1) that accumulates at most linearly. For logical GHZ-state preparation with the [[n,n-2,2]] Iceberg code under circuit-level depolarizing noise and ideal stabilizer measurements, first-order QED+PEC reaches n=200 physical qubits and lowers sampling overhead by three to four orders of magnitude relative to standard PEC while maintaining F 0.956. Syndrome-noise tests show that readout-only flips mainly increase post-selection cost, whereas noisy GHZ-assisted global stabilizer extraction can remove the advantage. This identifies a discrete-Zeno trade-off: cheap detection reshapes the effective channel PEC must invert, rather than simply adding overhead.
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