Stable Symmetry-Protected Topological Phases in Systems with Heralded Noise

We present a family of local quantum channels whose steady-states exhibit stable mixed-state symmetry-protected topological (SPT) order. Motivated by recent experimental progress on "erasure conversion" techniques that allow one to identify (herald) decoherence processes, we consider open systems with biased erasure noise, which leads to strongly symmetric heralded errors. We utilize this heralding to construct a local correction protocol that effectively confines errors into short-ranged pairs in the steady-state. Using a combination of numerical simulations and mean-field analysis, we show that our protocol stabilizes SPT order against a sufficiently low rate of decoherence. As the rate of heralded noise increases, SPT order is eventually lost through a directed percolation transition. We further find that while introducing unheralded errors destroys SPT order in the limit of long length- and time-scales, the correction protocol is sufficient for ensuring that local SPT order persists, with a correlation length that diverges as (1-fₑ) ^-1/2, where fₑ is the fraction of errors that are heralded.