Demonstrating Noise-adapted Quantum Error Correction With Break-Even Performance

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Quantum Physics arXiv:2603.04564 (quant-ph) [Submitted on 4 Mar 2026] Title:Demonstrating Noise-adapted Quantum Error Correction With Break-Even Performance Authors:Vismay Joshi, Anubhab Rudra, Sourav Dutta, Siddharth Dhomkar, Prabha Mandayam View a PDF of the paper titled Demonstrating Noise-adapted Quantum Error Correction With Break-Even Performance, by Vismay Joshi and 4 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:The promise of quantum computing is closer to reality today than ever before, thanks to rapid progress in the development of quantum hardware. Even as qubit lifetimes and gate fidelities continue to improve, realizing robust, fault-tolerant quantum computers is contingent upon the successful implementation of quantum error correction (QEC). Conventional QEC schemes have rather high resource overheads and low threshold requirements, making them challenging to implement on present day hardware. Here, we use a recently developed noise-adapted 3-qubit QEC scheme to demonstrate break-even performance against native amplitude-damping (AD) noise on IBM quantum hardware. We use variational quantum circuits to construct hardware-efficient encoding and decoding circuits. This scheme is probabilistic due to the non-unitary nature of the recovery operators, which are implemented via the block-encoding technique. We demonstrate logical qubit lifetimes exceeding those of the physical qubits by performing multiple rounds of QEC. To further protect the qubits from dephasing due to crosstalk, we incorporate dynamical decoupling into our noise-adapted QEC scheme in a seamless fashion. To account for the post-selection overhead, we define a measure of gain, that allows for faithful performance benchmarking of the protocol. Our analysis suggests that the performance of our protocol is limited primarily by the measurement readout fidelity, and is bound to improve with successive generations of quantum processors. Comments: Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph) Cite as: arXiv:2603.04564 [quant-ph] (or arXiv:2603.04564v1 [quant-ph] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.04564 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) Submission history From: Vismay Joshi [view email] [v1] Wed, 4 Mar 2026 19:50:16 UTC (8,156 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled Demonstrating Noise-adapted Quantum Error Correction With Break-Even Performance, by Vismay Joshi and 4 other authorsView PDFHTML (experimental)TeX Source view license Current browse context: quant-ph new | recent | 2026-03 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?) Links to Code Toggle Papers with Code (What is Papers with Code?) 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?)
