Leveraging erasure errors in logical qubits with metastable $^{171}$Yb atoms

Abstract: Implementing large-scale quantum algorithms with practical advantage will require fault-tolerance achieved through quantum error correction, but the associated overhead is a significant cost. The overhead can be reduced by engineering physical qubits with fewer errors, and by shaping the residual errors to be more easily correctable. In this work, we demonstrate quantum error correcting codes and logical qubit circuits in a metastable ${}^{171}$Yb qubit with a noise bias towards erasure errors, that is, errors whose location can be detected separate from any syndrome information. We show that dephasing errors on the nuclear spin qubit during coherent transport can be strongly suppressed, and implement robust entangling gates that maintain a high fidelity in the presence of gate beam inhomogeneity or pointing error. We demonstrate logical qubit encoding in the $[[4,2,2]]$ code, with error correction during decoding based on mid-circuit erasure measurements despite the fact that the code is too small to correct any Pauli errors. Finally, we demonstrate logical qubit teleportation between multiple code blocks with conditionally selected ancillas based on mid-circuit erasure checks, which is a key ingredient for leakage-robust error correction with neutral atoms.