Resilience Beyond the Light Cone: Error-Detected Primitives for Practical Dynamic Circuits

Abstract: Dynamic circuits, which augment unitary operations with mid-circuit measurements and classical feedforward, can generate long-range entanglement in constant depth, enabling low-depth primitives ranging from nontrivial state preparation to many-qubit entangling gates. Escaping the light-cone constraints of unitary circuits, however, comes at a cost: these primitives typically require a number of mid-circuit measurements that scales with system size and that, together with feedforward latency, can introduce errors that degrade the long-range entanglement they rely on. Here, we alleviate this tension by showing that many such primitives, when cast into a common framework, admit an error-detection scheme that trades infidelity for postselection overhead with no additional ancillas. Our framework thus unifies and upgrades a broad class of primitives including fan-out gates, multi-qubit Pauli rotations, the preparation of W and higher-weight Dicke states, and certain non-normal matrix product states. We also introduce a reduced-depth, error-detected implementation of the Hadamard test, extending the use cases of dynamic circuits to a key algorithmic primitive. Finally, we establish the practical utility of our scheme through experiments on a superconducting quantum processor. We demonstrate the error-detected preparation of a long-range entangled Bell pair spanning a 100-qubit chain with fidelity $F=0.59\pm0.02$, surpassing the entanglement-certification threshold $F>0.5$ that the baseline dynamic-circuit implementation fails to reach ($0.39\pm0.01$). Separately, we demonstrate constant-depth preparation of W states of up to 20 qubits by consuming GHZ states of up to 40 qubits, finding absolute fidelity improvements of $ΔF\approx 0.2$ across the largest sizes studied. Altogether, these results bring low-depth dynamic-circuit primitives within practical reach on present-day hardware.