Cultivating logical catalysts for fault-tolerant dyadic phase rotations

Yichen Xu, Xiao Wang (Jun 26 2026).

Abstract: We introduce a surface-code cultivation protocol for reusable logical catalyst states that implement exact fine dyadic phase gates $Z^{2^{-b}}$ by phase kickback. The catalyst is an eigenstate of a high-period Clifford circuit $U$, with a direct construction supported on $O(2^b)$ logical qubits. Once cultivated, each invocation implements the target phase through a controlled-$U$ gadget, removing Clifford+$T$ synthesis approximation error from the online gate and making the online non-Clifford depth independent of the target logical accuracy. As a concrete demonstration, we construct a catalyst for $\sqrt{T}=Z^{1/8}$, where $U$ is a nine-qubit brickwork Clifford circuit and controlled-$U$ consists of eight controlled-CNOTs. Starting from nine distance-three rotated-surface-code blocks, we cultivate the catalyst through logical-$U$ checks, syndrome extraction and postselection, code growth, and complementary-gap decoding. Due to the intrinsic fault tolerance of the phase read-out, a \emphsingle verification round already reaches the leading error-corrected scaling, in contrast to the repeated logical checks required when cultivating single-qubit magic states. A hybrid tensor-network and stabilizer simulation shows that, at physical error rate $p=10^{-3}$, the postselected catalyst can be grown to distance-seven rotated-surface-code blocks with logical leakage rate $\sim 10^{-6}$ using around seven expected attempts, and can be suppressed further with stronger postselection. Compared with existing protocols, our approach trades offline, phase-specific catalyst cultivation for exactness, reusability, and constant-depth online implementation of fixed fine dyadic phases in codes with restricted transversal gate sets.

Arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.27358