Maximally-Matched Mixture Decoding for Correlated Atom Loss in Quantum LDPC Codes

arXiv:2610.38283v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Heralded atom loss is a dominant noise channel in neutral atom quantum computing platforms, and losses at a two-qubit gate are strongly correlated: when one atom is lost, its gate partner is often lost too. This work shows how to exploit this correlation to construct a better decoder, focusing on [[144,12,12]] Gross code syndrome extraction circuits. Given a loss readout, the possible pairings of the lost qubits according to shared gates form a graph whose maximum matchings carry almost all of the conditional probability mass. Our maximal-matching-mixture (MMM) decoder builds a per-readout decoding hypergraph as a weighted mixture over exactly these loss scenarios.