Efficient diagnostics for quantum error correction

Fault-tolerant quantum computing will require accurate estimates of the resource overhead under different error correction strategies, but standard metrics such as gate fidelity and diamond distance have been shown to be poor predictors of logical performance. We present a scalable experimental approach based on Pauli error reconstruction to predict the performance of concatenated codes. Numerical evidence demonstrates that our method significantly outperforms predictions based on standard error metrics for various error models, even with limited data. We illustrate how this method assists in the selection of error correction schemes.