Given stabilizer operations and the ability to repeatedly prepare a single-qubit mixed state rho, can we do universal quantum computation? As motivation for this question, "magic state" distillation procedures can reduce the general fault-tolerance problem to that of performing fault-tolerant stabilizer circuits.
We improve the procedures of Bravyi and Kitaev in the Hadamard "magic" direction of the Bloch sphere to achieve a sharp threshold between those rho allowing universal quantum computation, and those for which any calculation can be efficiently classically simulated. As a corollary, the ability to repeatedly prepare any pure state which is not a stabilizer state (e.g., any single-qubit pure state which is not a Pauli eigenstate), together with stabilizer operations, gives quantum universality. It remains open whether there is also a tight separation in the so-called T direction.
Magic can be distributed non-locally in many-body entangled states, such as the low energy states of condensed matter systems. Using the Bravyi-Kitaev magic state distillation protocol, we find that non-local magic is distillable and can improve the distillation outcome. We analyze a few explicit examples and show that spin squeezing can be used to convert non-distillable states into distillable ones. Our analysis also suggests that the conventional product input states assumed by magic distillation protocols are extremely atypical among general states with distillable magic. It further justif…
Identifying necessary and sufficient conditions for universal quantum computing is a long-standing open problem for which contextuality is, perhaps, the only promising solution [Howard et al., Nature 510, 351 (2014)]. To justify this conjecture, Howard et al. showed that contextuality is equivalent to Wigner negativity for qudits, and is therefore necessary and possibly sufficient for qudit magic state distillation. Here, we reformulate magic state distillation in the language of discrete phase space, to show that any finite qudit magic state distillation routine contains bound states outside …
Magic state distillation uses special codes to suppress errors in input states, which are often tailored to a Clifford-twirled error model. We present detailed measurement sequences for magic state distillation protocols which can suppress arbitrary errors on any part of a protocol, assuming the independence of errors across qubits. Provided with input magic states, our protocol operates on a two-dimensional square grid by measurements of $ZZ$ on horizontal pairs of qubits, $XX$ on vertical pairs, and $Z,X$ on single qubits.
Magic state distillation protocols have a complicated non-linear nature. Analysis of protocols is therefore usually restricted to one-parameter families of states, which aids tractability. We show that if we lift this one-parameter restriction and embrace the complexity, distillation exhibits fractal properties. By studying these fractals we demonstrate that some protocols are more effective when not restricted. Low fidelity states that are usually worthless for distillation are now usable, and fewer iterations of the protocols are needed to reach high fidelity.
Magic state distillation is a resource intensive sub-routine for quantum computation. The ratio of noisy input states to output states with error rate at most $ε$ scales as $O(\log^γ(1/ε))$ (Bravyi and Haah, PRA 2012). In a breakthrough paper, Hastings and Haah (PRL 2018) showed that it is possible to construct distillation routines with sub-logarithmic overhead, achieving $γ\approx 0.6779$ and falsifying a conjecture that $γ$ is lower bounded by $1$. They then ask whether $γ$ can be made arbitrarily close to $0$. We answer this question in the affirmative for magic state distillation routines…
Many proposals for fault-tolerant quantum computation require injection of 'magic states' to achieve a universal set of operations. Some qubit states are above a threshold fidelity, allowing them to be converted into magic states via 'magic state distillation', a process based on stabilizer codes from quantum error correction. We define quantum weight enumerators that take into account the sign of the stabilizer operators. These enumerators completely describe the magic state distillation behavior when distilling T-type magic states. While it is straightforward to calculate them directly by co…
The distillation of magic states is an often-cited technique for enabling universal quantum computing once the error probability for a special subset of gates has been made negligible by other means. We present a routine for magic-state distillation that reduces the required overhead for a range of parameters of practical interest. Each iteration of the routine uses a four-qubit error-detecting code to distill the +1 eigenstate of the Hadamard gate at a cost of ten input states per two improved output states. Use of this routine in combination with the 15-to-1 distillation routine described by…
Magic state distillation is a critical component in leading proposals for fault-tolerant quantum computation. Relatively little is known, however, about how to construct a magic state distillation routine or, more specifically, which stabilizer codes are suitable for the task. While transversality of a non-Clifford gate within a code often leads to efficient distillation routines, it appears to not be a necessary condition. Here we have examined a number of small stabilizer codes and highlight a handful of which displaying interesting, albeit inefficient, distillation behaviour. Many of these …
We develop a procedure for distilling magic states used in universal quantum computing that requires substantially fewer initial resources than prior schemes. Our distillation circuit is based on a family of concatenated quantum codes that possess a transversal Hadamard operation, enabling each of these codes to distill the eigenstate of the Hadamard operator. A crucial result of this design is that low-fidelity magic states can be consumed to purify other high-fidelity magic states to even higher fidelity, which we call "multilevel distillation." When distilling in the asymptotic regime of in…
Quantum error correction and fault-tolerance have provided the possibility for large scale quantum computations without a detrimental loss of quantum information. A very natural class of gates for fault-tolerant quantum computation is the Clifford gate set and as such their usefulness for universal quantum computation is of great interest. Clifford group gates augmented by magic state preparation give the possibility of simulating universal quantum computation. However, experimentally one cannot expect to perfectly prepare magic states. Nonetheless, it has been shown that by repeatedly applyin…
The ternary Golay code -- one of the first and most beautiful classical error-correcting codes discovered -- naturally gives rise to an 11-qutrit quantum error correcting code. We apply this code to magic state distillation, a leading approach to fault-tolerant quantum computing. We find that the 11-qutrit Golay code can distill the "most magic" qutrit state -- an eigenstate of the qutrit Fourier transform known as the strange state -- with cubic error-suppression and a remarkably high threshold. It also distills the "second-most magic" qutrit state, the Norell state, with quadratic error-supp…
Despite significant overhead reductions since its first proposal, magic state distillation is often considered to be a very costly procedure that dominates the resource cost of fault-tolerant quantum computers. The goal of this work is to demonstrate that this is not true. By writing distillation circuits in a form that separates qubits that are capable of error detection from those that are not, most logical qubits used for distillation can be encoded at a very low code distance. This significantly reduces the space-time cost of distillation, as well as the number of qubits. In extreme cases,…
For certain quantum architectures and algorithms, most of the required resources are consumed during the distillation of one-qubit magic states for use in performing Toffoli gates. I show that the overhead for magic-state distillation can be reduced by merging distillation with the implementation of Toffoli gates. The resulting routine distills 8 one-qubit magic states directly to a Toffoli state, which can be used without further magic to perform a Toffoli gate.
Magic state distillation is an important primitive in fault-tolerant quantum computation. The magic states are pure non-stabilizer states which can be distilled from certain mixed non-stabilizer states via Clifford group operations alone. Because of the Gottesman-Knill theorem, mixtures of Pauli eigenstates are not expected to be magic state distillable, but it has been an open question whether all mixed states outside this set may be distilled. In this Letter we show that, when resources are finitely limited, non-distillable states exist outside the stabilizer octahedron. In analogy with the …
Magic state distillation (MSD) is a purification protocol that plays a central role in fault tolerant quantum computation. Repeated iteration of the steps of a MSD protocol, generates pure single non-stabilizer states, or magic states, from multiple copies of a mixed resource state using stabilizer operations only. Thus mixed resource states promote the stabilizer operations to full universality. Magic state distillation was introduced for qubit-based quantum computation, but little has been known concerning MSD in higher dimensional qudit-based computation. Here, we describe a general approac…
The leading paradigm for performing computation on quantum memories can be encapsulated as distill-then-synthesize. Initially, one performs several rounds of distillation to create high-fidelity magic states that provide one good T gate, an essential quantum logic gate. Subsequently, gate synthesis intersperses many T gates with Clifford gates to realise a desired circuit. We introduce a unified framework that implements one round of distillation and multi-qubit gate synthesis in a single step. Typically, our method uses the same number of T gates as conventional synthesis, but with the added …
Magic state distillation is a crucial component in the leading approaches to implementing universal fault tolerant quantum computation, with existing protocols for both qubit and higher dimensional systems. Early work focused on determining the region of distillable states for qubit protocols, yet comparatively little is known about which states can be distilled and with what distillable region for d>2. Here we focus on d=3 and present new four-qutrit distillation schemes that improve upon the known distillable region, and achieve distillation tight to the boundary of undistillable states for …
We propose families of protocols for magic state distillation -- important components of fault tolerance schemes --- for systems of odd prime dimension. Our protocols utilize quantum Reed-Muller codes with transversal non-Clifford gates. We find that, in higher dimensions, small and effective codes can be used that have no direct analogue in qubit (two-dimensional) systems. We present several concrete protocols, including schemes for three-dimensional (qutrit) and five-dimensional (ququint) systems. The five-dimensional protocol is, by many measures, the best magic state distillation scheme ye…
Recently we proposed a family of magic state distillation protocols that obtains asymptotic performance that is conjectured to be optimal. This family depends upon several codes, called "inner codes" and "outer codes." We presented some small examples of these codes as well as an analysis of codes in the asymptotic limit. Here, we analyze such protocols in an intermediate size regime, using hundreds to thousands of qubits. We use BCH inner codes, combined with various outer codes. We extend our protocols by adding error correction in some cases. We present a variety of protocols in various inp…
Quantum computers capable of solving classically intractable problems are under construction, and intermediate-scale devices are approaching completion. Current efforts to design large-scale devices require allocating immense resources to error correction, with the majority dedicated to the production of high-fidelity ancillary states known as magic-states. Leading techniques focus on dedicating a large, contiguous region of the processor as a single "magic-state distillation factory" responsible for meeting the magic-state demands of applications. In this work we design and analyze a set of o…
Quantum algorithms for quantum chemistry map the dynamics of electrons in a molecule to the dynamics of a coupled spin system. To reach chemical accuracy for interesting molecules, a large number of quantum gates must be applied which implies the need for quantum error correction and fault-tolerant quantum computation. Arbitrary fault-tolerant operations can be constructed from a small, universal set of fault-tolerant operations by gate compilation. Quantum chemistry algorithms are compiled by decomposing the dynamics of the coupled spin-system using a Trotter formula, synthesizing the decompo…
A set of stabilizer operations augmented by some special initial states known as 'magic states', gives the possibility of universal fault-tolerant quantum computation. However, magic state preparation inevitably involves nonideal operations that introduce noise. The most common method to eliminate the noise is magic state distillation (MSD) by stabilizer operations. Here we propose a hybrid MSD protocol by connecting a four-qubit H-type MSD with a five-qubit T-type MSD, in order to overcome some disadvantages of the previous MSD protocols. The hybrid MSD protocol further integrates distillable…
We present a theorem that shows that all useful protocols for magic state distillation output states with a fidelity that is upper-bounded by those generated by a much smaller class of protocols. This reduced class consists of the protocols where multiple copies of a state are projected onto a stabilizer codespace and the logical qubit is then decoded.
Any physical quantum device for quantum information processing is subject to errors in implementation. In order to be reliable and efficient, quantum computers will need error correcting or error avoiding methods. Fault-tolerance achieved through quantum error correction will be an integral part of quantum computers. Of the many methods that have been discovered to implement it, a highly successful approach has been to use transversal gates and specific initial states. A critical element for its implementation is the availability of high-fidelity initial states such as |0> and the Magic State.…
We propose a new family of error detecting stabilizer codes with an encoding rate 1/3 that permit a transversal implementation of the pi/8-rotation $T$ on all logical qubits. The new codes are used to construct protocols for distilling high-quality `magic' states $T|+>$ by Clifford group gates and Pauli measurements. The distillation overhead has a poly-logarithmic scaling as a function of the output accuracy, where the degree of the polynomial is $\log_2{3}\approx 1.6$. To construct the desired family of codes, we introduce the notion of a triorthogonal matrix --- a binary matrix in which any…
It has been conjectured [1] that for any distillation protocol for magic states for the $T$ gate, the number of noisy input magic states required per output magic state at output error rate $ε$ is $Ω(\log(1/ε))$. We show that this conjecture is false. We find a family of quantum error correcting codes of parameters $[[\sum_{i=w+1}^m \binom{m}{i}, \sum_{i=0}^{w} \binom{m}{i}, \sum_{i=w+1}^{r+1} \binom{r+1}{i}]]$ for any integers $ m > 2r$, $r > w \ge 0$, by puncturing quantum Reed-Muller codes. When $m > νr$, our code admits a transversal logical gate at the $ν$-th level of Clifford hierarchy. …
We present an infinite family of protocols to distill magic states for $T$-gates that has a low space overhead and uses an asymptotic number of input magic states to achieve a given target error that is conjectured to be optimal. The space overhead, defined as the ratio between the physical qubits to the number of output magic states, is asymptotically constant, while both the number of input magic states used per output state and the $T$-gate depth of the circuit scale linearly in the logarithm of the target error $δ$ (up to $\log \log 1/δ$). Unlike other distillation protocols, this protocol…
Magic state distillation is one of the leading candidates for implementing universal fault-tolerant logical gates. However, the distillation circuits themselves are not fault-tolerant, so there is additional cost to first implement encoded Clifford gates with negligible error. In this paper we present a scheme to fault-tolerantly and directly prepare magic states using flag qubits. One of these schemes uses a single extra ancilla, even with noisy Clifford gates. We compare the physical qubit and gate cost of this scheme to the magic state distillation protocol of Meier, Eastin, and Knill, whic…
We present a scheme for magic state distillation using punctured polar codes. Our results build on some recent work by Bardet et al. (ISIT, 2016) who discovered that polar codes can be described algebraically as decreasing monomial codes. Using this powerful framework, we construct tri-orthogonal quantum codes (Bravyi et al., PRA, 2012) that can be used to distill magic states for the $T$ gate. An advantage of these codes is that they permit the use of the successive cancellation decoder whose time complexity scales as $O(N\log(N))$. We supplement this with numerical simulations for the erasur…
Efficient magic state cultivation with lattice surgery
The University of Osaka（大阪大学）；Fujitsu Research, Fujitsu Limited（富士通研究所）；Center for Quantum Information and Quantum Biology, The University of Osaka（大阪大学量子信息与量子生物学中心）；RIKEN Center for Quantum Computing (RQC)（理化学研究所量子计算中心）
Quantum universality can be achieved using classically controlled stabilizer operations and repeated preparation of certain ancilla states. Which ancilla states suffice for universality? This "magic states distillation" question is closely related to quantum fault tolerance. Lower bounds on the noise tolerable on the ancilla help give lower bounds on the tolerable noise rate threshold for fault-tolerant computation. Upper bounds show the limits of threshold upper-bound arguments based on the Gottesman-Knill theorem. We extend the range of single-qubit mixed states that are known to give univer…
Magic state distillation is a resource intensive subroutine that consumes noisy input states to produce high-fidelity resource states that are used to perform logical operations in practical quantum-computing architectures. The resource cost of magic state distillation can be reduced by improving the fidelity of the raw input states. To this end, we propose an initialization protocol that offers a quadratic improvement in the error rate of the input magic states in architectures with biased noise. This is achieved by preparing an error-detecting code which detects the dominant errors that occu…
The overhead cost of performing universal fault-tolerant quantum computation for large scale quantum algorithms is very high. Despite several attempts at alternative schemes, magic state distillation remains one of the most efficient schemes for simulating non-Clifford gates in a fault-tolerant way. However, since magic state distillation circuits are not fault-tolerant, all Clifford operations must be encoded in a large distance code in order to have comparable failure rates with the magic states being distilled. In this work, we introduce a new concept which we call redundant ancilla encodin…
