Enhancing QECC Measurements with Classical Polar Codes: Insights from Toric Codes

This paper proposes an enhanced QECC measurement scheme for toric codes based on polar codes, which distinguishes from traditional multi-round measurements (essentially repetition codes). The proposed decoding process can be viewed as a two-stage procedure. In the first stage, we apply a polarbased measurement to recover the corrupted syndrome using CRC-Aided successive cancellation list (CA-SCL) decoding. In the second stage, we perform the original MWPM algorithm based on the recovered syndrome to correct the qubits. Numerical results show that: 1) under the same or even greater measurement efficiency, the proposed polar-based measurement significantly reduces the syndrome error rate compared with traditional multi-round measurement schemes; 2) when the number of measurements is halved, the proposed polar code-based scheme still achieves logical error rates better than classical multi-round measurement schemes; and 3) thanks to the superior decoding performance of polar codes, the proposed scheme effectively approaches the performance of perfect measurements. © 2025 IEEE.