Stabilization of symmetry-protected long-range entanglement in stochastic quantum circuits

Long-range entangled states are vital for quantum information processing and quantum metrology. Preparing such states by combining measurements with unitary gates opened new possibilities for efficient protocols with finite-depth quantum circuits. The complexity of these algorithms is crucial for the resource requirements on a large-scale noisy quantum device, while their stability to perturbations decides the fate of their implementation. In this work, we consider stochastic quantum circuits in one and two dimensions comprising randomly applied unitary gates and local measurements. These operations preserve a class of discrete local symmetries, which are broken due to the stochasticity arising from timing and gate imperfections. In the absence of randomness, the protocol generates a symmetry-protected long-range entangled state in a finite-depth circuit. In the general case, by studying the time evolution under this hybrid circuit, we analyze the time to reach the target entangled state. We find two important time scales that we associate with the emergence of certain symmetry generators. The quantum trajectories embody the local symmetry with a time scaling logarithmically with system size, while global symmetries require exponentially long times. We devise error-mitigation protocols that significantly lower both time scales and investigate the stability of the algorithm to perturbations that naturally arise in experiments. We also generalize the protocol to realize toric code and Xu-Moore states in two dimensions, opening avenues for future studies of anyonic excitations. Our results unveil a fundamental relationship between symmetries and dynamics across a range of lattice geometries, which contributes to a broad understanding of the stability of preparation algorithms in terms of phase transitions. Our work paves the way for efficient error correction for quantum state preparation.