Co-Designing Error Mitigation and Error Detection for Logical Qubits
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Quantum Physics arXiv:2604.19871 (quant-ph) [Submitted on 21 Apr 2026] Title:Co-Designing Error Mitigation and Error Detection for Logical Qubits Authors:Rohan S. Kumar, Takahiro Tsunoda, Sophia H. Xue, Dantong Li, Robert J. Schoelkopf, Yongshan Ding View a PDF of the paper titled Co-Designing Error Mitigation and Error Detection for Logical Qubits, by Rohan S. Kumar and 5 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Near-term quantum workloads demand error management, yet the two lightest-weight techniques, Quantum Error Detection (QED) and Probabilistic Error Cancellation (PEC), have complementary cost profiles whose joint architectural design space remains unexplored. QED encodes logical qubits and discards error-flagged runs, filtering noise with low qubit overhead but leaving residual errors; PEC can correct these in software, but at exponential cost in noise strength. If QED efficiently reduces per-gate noise, PEC's cost savings can outweigh QED's discard overhead; realizing this, however, requires solving two system-level design challenges. First, the \textit{QED interval} -- how often detection cycles are inserted -- is a tunable architectural parameter governing the cost-accuracy tradeoff. We derive an efficiency condition and show that the canonical one-cycle-per-gate frequency does not achieve break-even in any code we evaluate, while optimized intervals on high-rate Iceberg codes do. Second, we discover that naive PEC+QED integration \textit{degrades} accuracy below the QED-only baseline. The root cause is a transient error profile in the first detection cycle that corrupts PEC's noise model. We develop \textit{steady-state extraction}, a co-designed characterization protocol that isolates steady-state error behavior, reducing estimation bias by up to $10.2\times$. On a $[[6,4,2]]$ Iceberg code running QAOA ($p{=}4$--$8$) with a fixed shot budget, PEC+QED achieves $2$--$11\times$ lower absolute error and up to $31\times$ lower MSE versus PEC on physical qubits, with per-interval savings compounding over interval depth. Comments: Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Hardware Architecture (cs.AR) Cite as: arXiv:2604.19871 [quant-ph] (or arXiv:2604.19871v1 [quant-ph] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.19871 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) Submission history From: Rohan Kumar [view email] [v1] Tue, 21 Apr 2026 18:00:02 UTC (3,372 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled Co-Designing Error Mitigation and Error Detection for Logical Qubits, by Rohan S. Kumar and 5 other authorsView PDFHTML (experimental)TeX Source view license Current browse context: quant-ph new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs cs.AR References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADSGoogle Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Loading... BibTeX formatted citation × loading... Data provided by: Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate (What is Replicate?) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs. Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)