Long-range entangled criticality from coherent errors

arXiv:2611.03811v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We find that coherent error can induce a phase transition from the clean surface code phase into an extended long-range entangled critical regime with diverging Markov length. To demonstrate this, we establish two general results of independent interest. The first relates topology and quantum information to mixed-state entanglement: we show that when a noise channel acting on a topological code preserves a higher-form symmetry and nonzero coherent information, the noisy state for generic logical input is long-range entangled.