Investigating the effect of real-time qubit reset on stabilizer measurements

Stabilizer-based quantum error correction relies on auxiliary qubits to measure stabilizer operators acting on data qubits that encode a logical qubit. In the surface code, repeated stabilizer measurements project the logical state into a stabilizer subspace, enabling the detection of errors on both data and ancilla qubits. We investigate the effect of conditional and unconditional real-time reset protocols on the expectation values of observed error syndromes as a function of cycle number and cycle time. Our active reset scheme combines unconditional and conditional reset pulses, where a state machine on the central control FPGA tracks the stabilizer state in real time and triggers conditional pulses to suppress ancilla errors. Finally, we discuss the impact of the reset protocol on key surface-code performance metrics, including its influence on leakage processes.