Universal syndrome-based recovery for noise-adapted quantum error correction

Abstract: Quantum error correction (QEC) is an essential tool for quantum computing that enables reliable information processing in the presence of noise. Syndrome measurements play a central role in QEC, making it possible to unambiguously identify the location and type of errors. While syndrome extraction is natural for conventional QEC protocols, where the errors satisfy certain algebraic constraints \emph{perfectly}, this feature is largely missing in the framework of approximate or noise-adapted QEC. Rather, noise-adapted recovery maps like the Petz map are used in the latter scenario, but implementing such tailored recovery processes on the hardware can be quite challenging. Here, we address this issue by proposing an algorithmic approach to identifying error syndromes for arbitrary codes and noise processes. We then use our algorithm to develop a variant of the Petz recovery map -- a syndrome-based Petz recovery map -- which can then be implemented via syndrome measurements. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in the context of amplitude-damping noise, by constructing the syndrome-based Petz map for the $4$-qubit code. We execute our recovery circuits on IBM quantum hardware to successfully demonstrate break-even performance of a noise-adapted QEC protocol with upto a threefold improvement of the qubit $T_{1}$ times.