Long-range entangled criticality from coherent errors

arXiv:2611.03811v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We find that coherent error can induce a phase transition from the clean surface code phase into an extended long-range entangled critical regime with diverging Markov length. To demonstrate this, we establish two general results of independent interest. The first relates topology and quantum information to mixed-state entanglement: we show that when a noise channel acting on a topological code preserves a higher-form symmetry and nonzero coherent information, the noisy state for generic logical input is long-range entangled. The second generalizes the local recovery construction based on finite Markov length to any locally parameterized family, thus encompassing local Lindbladian evolution, coherent errors followed by syndrome dephasing, and thermal states. We apply these results to the honeycomb surface code, in which we find an extended long-range entangled critical regime that is a quasi-long-ranged counterpart of 1-form strong-to-weak spontaneous symmetry breaking. As a byproduct of these studies, we relate the conditional mutual information to conductance in a Majorana network model.