Flag at origin: a modular fault-tolerant preparation for CSS codes

Abstract: Fault-tolerant (FT) preparation of diverse logical stabilizer states in quantum error-correcting (QEC) codes is essential for FT computation. Existing constructions of these FT circuits are often constrained by classical computational resources or result in unnecessarily large quantum circuits. This work introduces a modular construction for FT preparation circuits in CSS codes of arbitrary distance, yielding significantly more resource-efficient circuits than previous approaches, especially for the largest codes studied. The key insight is that in bipartite CX circuits used to prepare CSS states, $X$ errors propagate in one direction across the qubit partition, while $Z$ errors propagate in the opposite direction. By appending $X$-detecting flag gadgets to the first partition and $Z$-detecting flag gadgets to the second, the circuit becomes FT. To manage the associated overhead, we propose an algorithm that discovers optimal (or near-optimal) flag gadgets at any distance. These gadgets are reusable across different QEC codes and FT subroutines, such as flag-based QEC. We estimate the logical state preparation error using subset-sampling Monte Carlo simulations at the circuit level, combined with approximate maximum-likelihood look-up table decoding. On Quantinuum's H2-1 device, preparation of the $\lvert\bar{0}\rangle$ state in the [[23,1,7]] Golay code achieves a logical SPAM error rate of $3.3_{-2.4}^{+8.6} \times 10<sup>{-4}$ with an acceptance rate of $47.23(86)\%$. This surpasses (within $95\%$ confidence intervals) the minimum SPAM error rate of $6.0(1.6) \times 10<sup>{-4}$ for a physical $\lvert 0\rangle$, as well as the best previously demonstrated logical state preparations.