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How do you run a quantum gate without ever opening the computer?

Alexander Frei, Sascha Zakaib-Bernier, Zachary Mann, Michael Vasmer, Victor V. Albert

June 1, 2026

Quantum error-correcting codes can be "switched" between each other through measurements, and if you do a closed loop of such switches you can enact a logical gate on encoded information — without ever touching individual qubits directly. This paper formalizes that idea using the ZX-calculus diagram language, turning the search for useful gate sequences into something a computer can automate. As a concrete payoff, they find a logical phase gate for the seven-qubit code that was previously thought to have no accessible Clifford gates via standard physical operations.
Published as Chutes and Ladders: Dynamical Automorphisms via the ZX-Calculus arXiv:2606.02542
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