Quantum Error Detection with Generalized Syndrome Measurement

Quantum error detection has been an experimental focus on early fault-tolerant quantum hardware. However, it requires multiple mid-circuit measurements to extract the syndrome and the readout-induced noise acts as a main contribution to the state infidelity. We present a novel method named Generalized Syndrome Measurement for quantum error detection that only requires a single-shot measurement on a single ancilla, while the canonical syndrome measurement needs to measure multiple times to extract the syndrome for each stabilizer generator. Our method minimizes the readout-induced noise by using single-shot measurements with a tolerable overhead on the gate complexity. We simulated the performance of our method using [[4, 2, 2]] and [[5, 1, 3]] code under realistic noise, and our method outperforms the canonical method when the gate error is comparatively small than the readout error. As mid-circuit measurements are more costly for various kinds of near-term scalable quantum hardware, our method can significantly boost the development of early fault-tolerant quantum computing.