Fault-tolerant preparation of arbitrary logical states in the cat code

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fault-tolerant method for preparing arbitrary logical states in the cat code, effectively suppressing dominant errors and achieving high fidelity in superconducting cavity platforms.

Contribution

It presents a complete fault-tolerant framework for arbitrary logical state preparation in the four-legged cat code, with error suppression and scalability to multiple modes.

Findings

Logical infidelity around 10^{-4} in simulations

First-order errors are fully suppressed

Error rate scales nearly quadratically with physical error rate

Abstract

Preparing high-fidelity logical states is a central challenge in fault-tolerant quantum computing, yet existing approaches struggle to balance control complexity against resource overhead. Here, we present a complete framework for the fault-tolerant preparation of arbitrary logical states encoded in the four-legged cat code. This framework is engineered to suppress the dominant incoherent errors, including excitation decay and dephasing in both the bosonic mode and the ancilla via error detection. Numerical simulations with experimentally realistic parameters on a 3D superconducting cavity platform yield logical infidelities on the order of $10^{-4}$. A scaling analysis confirms that the logical error rate grows nearly quadratically with the physical error rate, confirming that all first-order errors are fully suppressed. Our protocol is compatible with current hardware and is scalable to multiple bosonic modes, providing a resource-efficient foundation for magic state preparation and higher-level concatenated quantum error correction.