Walking Floquet code circuits for zero-overhead leakage reduction

Quantum Physics arXiv:2609.10666 (quant-ph) [Submitted on 9 Sep 2026] Title:Walking Floquet code circuits for zero-overhead leakage reduction Authors:Hanna Westerheim, Kaavya Sahay, Shruti Puri View a PDF of the paper titled Walking Floquet code circuits for zero-overhead leakage reduction, by Hanna Westerheim and 2 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Leakage, occurring when a qubit undetectably exits the computational subspace, poses a significant challenge for quantum error correction by inducing correlated errors in space and time. These correlations reduce both the code threshold and the effective code distance. To address this challenge, we introduce two zero-overhead walking circuits for the honeycomb Floquet code (hFC), termed the swirling and sliding circuits, which periodically remove leakage while dynamically protecting logical qubits via a schedule of anticommuting two-body measurements. Unlike previous dynamic circuits for the hFC, ours preserves the distance to Pauli errors. We further study their performance under leakage and find that, for two leakage noise models, they may correct as many leakage errors as Pauli errors, improving on the more widely known walking surface code. Through numerical simulation, we observe that finite-error-rate performance under leakage is strongly influenced by entropic effects, producing a pronounced waterfall regime in which the logical error rate decreases much more rapidly with physical error rate than the expected distance-limited scaling. In this regime, even when asymptotic predictions suggest otherwise, the hFC can outperform the same-distance walking surface code in error rates and sub-threshold logical error scaling. Comments: Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph) Cite as: arXiv:2609.10666 [quant-ph] (or arXiv:2609.10666v1 [quant-ph] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.10666 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) Submission history From: Hanna Westerheim [view email] [v1] Wed, 9 Sep 2026 18:00:00 UTC (7,238 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled Walking Floquet code circuits for zero-overhead leakage reduction, by Hanna Westerheim and 2 other authorsView PDFHTML (experimental)TeX Source view license Current browse context: quant-ph new | recent | 2026-09 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?)