Diego Ruiz, Jérémie Guillaud, Christophe Vuillot, Mazyar Mirrahimi (Jul 18 2025).
Abstract: Magic state distillation enables universal fault-tolerant quantum computation by implementing non-Clifford gates via the preparation of high-fidelity magic states. However, it comes at the cost of substantial logical-level overhead in both space and time. In this work, we propose a very low-cost magic state distillation scheme for biased-noise qubits. By leveraging the noise bias, our scheme enables the preparation of a magic state with a logical error rate of
3×10−7, using only 53 qubits and 5.5 error correction rounds, under a noise bias of
η≳5×106 and a phase-flip noise rate of
0.1%. This reduces the circuit volume by more than one order of magnitude relative to magic state cultivation for unbiased-noise qubits and by more than two orders of magnitude relative to standard magic state distillation. Moreover, our scheme provides three key advantages over previous proposals for biased-noise qubits. First, it only requires nearest-neighbor two-qubit gates on a 2D lattice. Second, the logical fidelity remains nearly identical even at a more modest noise bias of
η≳80, at the cost of a slightly increased circuit volume. Third, the scheme remains effective even at high physical phase-flip rates, in contrast to previously proposed approaches whose circuit volume grows exponentially with the error rate. Our construction is based on unfolding the
X stabilizer group of the Hadamard 3D quantum Reed-Muller code in 2D, enabling distillation at the physical level rather than the logical level, and is therefore referred to as
unfolded distillation.
