Zeno-Enhanced Probabilistic Error Cancellation with Quantum Error Detection Codes
Abstract
Probabilistic error cancellation (PEC) is unbiased but suffers exponential sampling overhead set by noise-weighted circuit volume, whereas quantum error-detecting codes (QEDCs) remove many physical faults by stabilizer post-selection but leave an undetectable logical residue. We exploit this complementarity by using post-selection to map physical noise to a weaker accepted logical channel, and then applying PEC only to the residual channel. The resulting feedback-free QED+PEC scheme interleaves Clifford logical blocks, stabilizer measurements, post-selection, and probabilistic cancellation on accepted trajectories, without real-time decoding or active recovery. A key complication is that post-selection correlates accepted fault branches through stabilizer-commutation constraints, so the sparse Pauli-Lindblad factorization underlying bare PEC no longer applies directly. We therefore construct the inverse channel perturbatively: for fixed order , only accepted fault branches up to order are retained, reducing preprocessing from branches to per block. The order- protocol cancels the normalized post-selected channel through degree , leaving a per-block error that accumulates at most linearly. For logical GHZ-state preparation with the Iceberg code under circuit-level depolarizing noise and ideal stabilizer measurements, first-order QED+PEC reaches physical qubits and lowers sampling overhead by three to four orders of magnitude relative to standard PEC while maintaining . Syndrome-noise tests show that readout-only flips mainly increase post-selection cost, whereas noisy GHZ-assisted global stabilizer extraction can remove the advantage. This identifies a discrete-Zeno trade-off: cheap detection reshapes the effective channel PEC must invert, rather than simply adding overhead.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.12149,
title = {Zeno-Enhanced Probabilistic Error Cancellation with Quantum Error Detection Codes},
author = {Yi Yuan and Yuanchen Zhao and Dong E. Liu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.12149},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
33 pages, 13 figures