Recent advances in quantum hardware and error correction have paved the way for early fault-tolerant (EFT) quantum computing. We propose iSwitch, a hybrid system architecture for trapped-ion quantum computers (TIQC) that exploits ultra-high-fidelity single-qubit gates and efficient logical CNOTs enabled by ion shuttling. iSwitch employs bare qubits for single-qubit operations and QEC-encoded logical qubits for two-qubit gates, avoiding full logical encoding, gate synthesis, and magic state distillation. To enable this selective encoding, we develop a low-noise conversion protocol between bare and logical qubits, a hybrid instruction set tailored to 2D TIQC layouts, and a compiler that minimizes conversion overhead and optimizes scheduling. Evaluations on variational quantum algorithm benchmarks show that iSwitch achieves comparable fidelity to conventional QEC methods, while reducing qubit and operation counts by roughly 33–50%, offering a practical, resource-efficient path toward EFT quantum computing on trapped-ion platforms.

Stabilizer states are a prime resource for a number of applications in quantum information science, such as secret-sharing and measurement-based quantum computation. This motivates us to study the entanglement of noisy stabilizer states across a bipartition. We show that the spectra of the corresponding reduced states can be expressed in terms of properties of an associated stabilizer code. In particular, this allows us to show that the coherent information is related to the so-called syndrome entropy of the underlying code. We use this viewpoint to find stabilizer states that are resilient against noise, allowing for more robust entanglement distribution in near-term quantum networks. We specialize our results to the case of graph states, where the found connections with stabilizer codes reduces back to classical linear codes for dephasing noise. On our way we provide an alternative proof of the fact that every qubit stabilizer code is equivalent up to single-qubit Clifford gates to a graph code.

It is well known that for the discrimination of classical and quantum channels in the finite, non-asymptotic regime, adaptive strategies can give an advantage over non-adaptive strategies. However, Hayashi [IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 55(8), 3807 (2009)] showed that in the asymptotic regime, the exponential error rate for the discrimination of classical channels is not improved in the adaptive setting. We show that, for the discrimination of classical-quantum channels, adaptive strategies do not lead to an asymptotic advantage. As our main result, this establishes Stein's lemma for classical-quantum channels. Our proofs are based on the concept of amortized distinguishability of channels, which we analyse using entropy inequalities.