Mitigating Temporal Fragility in the XY Surface Code

An important outstanding challenge that must be overcome in order to fully utilize the XY surface code for correcting biased Pauli noise is the phenomenon of fragile temporal boundaries that arises during the standard logical state-preparation and measurement protocols. To address this challenge we propose a new logical state-preparation protocol based on locally entangling qubits into small Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger-like states prior to making the stabilizer measurements that place them in the XY-code state. We prove that in this new procedure $O(\sqrt{n})$ high-rate errors along a single lattice boundary can cause a logical failure, leading to an almost quadratic reduction in the number of fault configurations compared to the standard state-preparation approach. Moreover, the code becomes equivalent to a repetition code for high-rate errors, guaranteeing a 50% code-capacity threshold during state preparation for infinitely biased noise. With a simple matching decoder we confirm that our preparation protocol outperforms the standard protocol in terms of both threshold and logical error rate in the fault-tolerant regime where measurements are unreliable and at experimentally realistic biases. We also discuss how our state-preparation protocol can be inverted for similar fragile-boundary-mitigated logical-state measurement.