LightStim: A Framework for QEC Protocol Evaluation and Prototyping with Automated DEM Construction

TL;DR

LightStim automates the construction of Detector Error Models during quantum circuit compilation, enabling rigorous, end-to-end evaluation and prototyping of diverse quantum error correction protocols without protocol-specific input.

Contribution

It introduces LightStim, a framework that automates DEM creation, facilitating systematic evaluation and exploration of quantum error correction protocols with no manual annotation.

Findings

LightStim accurately reproduces detector counts and logical error rates.

It accelerates protocol exploration, demonstrated with a novel lattice surgery design.

Benchmarking confirms LightStim's effectiveness across various QEC protocols.

Abstract

Fault-tolerant quantum computing increasingly demands rigorous, circuit-level evaluation of diverse quantum error correction (QEC) protocols and efficient prototyping of new ones. Such evaluation requires both the physical circuit and its Detector Error Model (DEM) to simulate end-to-end logical error rates. However, DEM construction today is performed by manual annotation, a tedious and error-prone process that effectively limits evaluation to simple memory experiments. We present LightStim, a framework that automates DEM construction concurrently with circuit compilation by maintaining a Pauli tableau augmented with measurement records, with no protocol-specific input required. We benchmark LightStim across protocols from memory experiments to end-to-end distillation circuits; cross-validation against public implementations confirms exact detector and observable counts and consistent logical error rates. LightStim additionally accelerates the exploration of new protocols, which we demonstrate through a novel heterogeneous cross-code lattice surgery design between surface and punctured quantum Reed-Muller codes. These capabilities together make LightStim a unified infrastructure for systematic QEC protocol evaluation and exploration.