Scheduling Lattice Surgery with Magic State Cultivation

Steven Hofmeyr, Mathias Weiden, Justin Kalloor, John Kubiatowicz, Costin Iancu (Dec 09 2025).

Abstract: Fault-tolerant quantum computation using surface codes relies on efficient scheduling of non-Clifford operations, realized via the injection of magic states produced through a probabilistic process that dominates spacetime costs. Existing scheduling approaches use dedicated bus qubits for routing and separate peripheral ancilla qubit factories for magic state preparation, leading to inefficient resource utilization. With the advent of magic state cultivation, preparation qubits can be placed anywhere within the surface code architecture. We introduce Pure Magic scheduling, which dynamically re-purposes magic state cultivation qubits for routing operations, eliminating dedicated bus infrastructure. By interrupting cultivation when qubits are needed for routing, Pure Magic naturally favors shorter cultivation times while ensuring no ancilla qubit remains idle. Our evaluation across 17 benchmark circuits improves scheduling efficiency by 19% to 223% compared to traditional bus routing and decreases average magic state preparation time by 2.6x to 9.7x. Benefits scale with circuit parallelism, making Pure Magic particularly valuable for highly parallel quantum algorithms. The Pure Magic architecture represents a paradigm shift from static to dynamic, demand-driven scheduling in fault-tolerant quantum architectures.

Arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.06484