Fail fast: techniques to probe rare events in quantum error correction

Quantum Physics arXiv:2511.15177 (quant-ph) [Submitted on 19 Nov 2025] Title:Fail fast: techniques to probe rare events in quantum error correction Authors:Michael E. Beverland, Malcolm Carroll, Andrew W. Cross, Theodore J. Yoder View a PDF of the paper titled Fail fast: techniques to probe rare events in quantum error correction, by Michael E. Beverland and 3 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:The ultimate goal of quantum error correction is to create logical qubits with very low error rates (e.g. 1e-12) and assemble them into large-scale quantum computers capable of performing many (e.g. billions) of logical gates on many (e.g. thousands) of logical qubits. However, it is necessarily difficult to directly assess the performance of such high-quality logical qubits using standard Monte Carlo sampling because logical failure events become very rare. Building on existing approaches to this problem, we develop three complementary techniques to characterize the rare-event regime for general quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes under circuit noise. (I) We propose a well-motivated, low-parameter ansatz for the failure spectrum (the fraction of fault sets of each size that fail) that empirically fits all the QEC systems we studied and predicts logical error rates at all physical error rates. (II) We find min-weight logical operators of syndrome measurement circuits and exactly compute the number of min-weight failing configurations. (III) We generalize the splitting method to qLDPC codes using multi-seeded Metropolis sampling to improve convergence for systems with many inequivalent logical operators. We apply these tools to distance-6, -12, and -18 bivariate bicycle codes under circuit noise, observing strong low-error-rate performance with the recently proposed Relay decoder but also considerable scope for further improvement. Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph) Cite as: arXiv:2511.15177 [quant-ph] (or arXiv:2511.15177v1 [quant-ph] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2511.15177 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) Submission history From: Michael Beverland E [view email] [v1] Wed, 19 Nov 2025 06:57:29 UTC (6,037 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled Fail fast: techniques to probe rare events in quantum error correction, by Michael E. Beverland and 3 other authorsView PDFHTML (experimental)TeX Source view license Current browse context: quant-ph new | recent | 2025-11 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?)