Controlling qubit drift by recycling error correction syndromes

Physical qubits are susceptible to systematic drift, above and beyond the stochastic Markovian noise that motivates quantum error correction. This parameter drift must be compensated -- if it is ignored, error rates will rise to intolerable levels -- but compensation requires knowing the parameters' current value, which appears to require halting experimental work to recalibrate (e.g. via quantum tomography). Fortunately, this is untrue. I show how to perform on-the-fly recalibration on the physical qubits in an error correcting code, using only information from the error correction syndromes. The algorithm for detecting and compensating drift is very simple -- yet, remarkably, when used to compensate Brownian drift in the qubit Hamiltonian, it achieves a stabilized error rate very close to the theoretical lower bound. Against 1/f noise, it is less effective only because 1/f noise is (like white noise) dominated by high-frequency fluctuations that are uncompensatable.