Locating Rydberg decay error in the swap leakage reduction circuit protocol
Phys. Rev. A 113, 042451 – Published 24 April, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/zchg-x177
Abstract
Qubit leakage and loss, particularly Rydberg-induced decay during two-qubit gates, pose significant challenges to fault-tolerant quantum computing with neutral atom arrays, as they propagate to correlated errors and degrade code distance. Here, we present a hardware-efficient scheme for addressing Rydberg decay using the swap-Leakage Reduction Circuit (swap-LRC) protocol, which leverages ancilla-data qubit swaps for in-line leakage mitigation. This strategy eliminates the need for atom-species-specific midcircuit detection or additional ancillary qubits. Based on experimental detection capabilities, we present two specialized decoders. For detectable leakage or loss (e.g., in ), our Located Decoder achieves a high threshold of 2.33% per cnot gate and an improved error distance, significantly outperforming conventional Pauli error models. More interestingly, for scenarios where only one error type is detectable (e.g., atom loss for ), our Critical Decoder specifically targets and mitigates the most detrimental critical faults caused by correlated leakage, achieving an error distance comparable to standard Pauli errors. Our findings offer insights for handling complex non-Pauli errors for neutral atom quantum computation.