Neutral atom quantum computers and to a lesser extent trapped ions may suffer from atom loss. In this work, we investigate the impact of atom loss in long chains of trapped ions. Even though this is a relatively rare event, ion loss in long chains must be addressed because it destabilizes the entire chain resulting in the loss of all the qubits of the chain. We propose a solution to the chain loss problem based on (1) a quantum error correction code distributed over multiple long chains, (2) beacon qubits within each long chain to detect the loss of a chain, and (3) a decoder adapted to correct a combination of circuit faults and erasures after beacon qubits convert chain losses into erasures. We verify the chain loss correction capability of our scheme through circuit level simulations with a distributed [[72,12,6]] BB code with beacon qubits.
@article{arxiv.2511.16632,
title = {Correction of chain losses in trapped ion quantum computers},
author = {Nolan J. Coble and Min Ye and Nicolas Delfosse},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.16632},
year = {2025}
}