Determining the best attainable threshold for qudit magic state distillation is directly related to the question of whether or not contextuality is sufficient for universal quantum computation. We show that the performance of a qudit correcting code for magic state distillation is captured by its complete weight enumerator. For the qutrit strange state -- a maximally magic non-stabilizer state -- the performance of a code is captured by its simple weight enumerator. This result allows us to carry out an extensive search for high-threshold magic state distillation routines for the strange state. Our search covers all
[[n,1]]3 qutrit stabilizer codes with a complete set of transversal Clifford gates for
n≤23, and all
[[n,1]]3 stabilizer codes with a transversal
H2 gate with
n≤9 qudits. For
n=23, we find over 600 CSS codes that can distill the qutrit strange state with cubic noise suppression. While none of these codes surpass the threshold of the 11-qutrit Golay code, their existence suggests that, for large codes, the ability to distill the qutrit strange state is somewhat generic.
Quantum error correction and fault-tolerance are at the heart of any scalable quantum computation architecture. Developing a set of tools that satisfy the requirements of fault- tolerant schemes is thus of prime importance for future quantum information processing implementations. The Clifford gate set has the desired fault-tolerant properties, preventing bad propagation of errors within encoded qubits, for many quantum error correcting codes, yet does not provide full universal quantum computation. Preparation of magic states can enable universal quantum computation in conjunction with Clifford operations, however preparing magic states experimentally will be imperfect due to implementation errors. Thankfully, there exists a scheme to distill pure magic states from prepared noisy magic states using only operations from the Clifford group and measurement in the Z-basis, such a scheme is called magic state distillation [1]. This work investigates the robustness of magic state distillation to faults in state preparation and the application of the Clifford gates in the protocol. We establish that the distillation scheme is robust to perturbations in the initial state preparation and characterize the set of states in the Bloch sphere that converge to the T-type magic state in different fidelity regimes. Additionally, we show that magic state distillation is robust to low levels of gate noise and that performing the distillation scheme using noisy Clifford gates is a more efficient than using encoded fault-tolerant gates due to the large overhead in fault-tolerant quantum computing architectures.
Magic states enable universal, fault-tolerant quantum computation within the stabilizer framework. Their non-stabilizerness supplies the resource needed to bypass the Eastin-Knill theorem while allowing fault-tolerant distillation. Although many measures of magic exist, not every nonzero-magic state is known to be distillable, and many of currently known distillable states are special cases of Clifford-stabilizer states, defined as pure states uniquely stabilized by finite Clifford subgroups. We develop a general framework for group-covariant functionals on Hermitian operators, introducing the notions of
G-stabilizer spaces, states, and codes for arbitrary finite subgroups
G⊂U(H). We define analytic families of
G-covariant functionals and prove that any
G-invariant pure state is extremal for a broad class of derived functionals, including symmetric, max-type, and Rényi-type functionals, whenever the underlying family is
G-covariant. This extremality holds for purity-preserving variations orthogonal to the stabilized subspace. Specializing to the Pauli and Clifford groups, we recover the extremality structure of canonical magic measures such as mana, stabilizer Rényi entropies, generalized Rényi entropies, and stabilizer fidelity, and show that Clifford-stabilizer states extremize them. We classify such states for qubits, qutrits, ququints, and two-qubit systems, identifying new candidates for magic distillation. We further propose an inefficient distillation protocol for a two-qubit magic state with stabilizer fidelity exceeding standard benchmarks, and conjecture that SIC-POVM fiducial states are Clifford-stabilizer states.
We show that the physical consistency of magic state distillation imposes new constraints on the weight enumerators of classical error-correcting codes. We establish that for
∣T⟩-state distillation protocols based on linear self-orthogonal
GF(4) codes, the distillation threshold and noise-suppression exponent are directly determined by the code's simple weight enumerator. By enforcing the physical consistency of the distillation process -- specifically, that the probability of successfully projecting onto the target state must be non-negative -- we derive a new set of constraints on classical weight enumerators. These ``quantum consistency'' constraints prove to be strictly stronger than those derived from classical invariant theory, yielding new upper bounds on the minimum distance of certain classical and quantum codes. Most notably, we show that these new constraints resolve a long-standing open problem in classical coding theory by proving the non-existence of extremal Hermitian self-dual codes over
GF(4) with parameters
[12m,6m,4m+2]. Additionally, we use our formalism to perform an exhaustive search of distillation protocols based on linear
GF(4) codes with
n<20, finding no protocols with thresholds exceeding the 5-qubit code, and we derive analytic upper bounds on the noise-suppression exponents of such distillation routines as a function of
n.
Abstract Magic states have been widely studied in recent years as resource states that help quantum computers achieve fault-tolerant universal quantum computing. The fault-tolerant quantum computing requires fault-tolerant implementation of a set of universal logical gates. Stabilizer code, as a commonly used error correcting code with good properties, can apply the Clifford gates transversally which is fault tolerant. But only Clifford gates cannot realize universal computation. Magic states are introduced to construct non-Clifford gates that combine with Clifford operations to achieve universal quantum computing. Since the preparation of quantum states is inevitably accompanied by noise, preparing the magic state with high fidelity and low overhead is the crucial problem to realizing universal quantum computation. In this paper, we survey the related literature in the past 20 years and introduce the common types of magic states, the protocols to obtain high-fidelity magic states, and overhead analysis for these protocols. Finally, we discuss the future directions of this field.
Magic state distillation is a crucial yet resource-intensive process in fault-tolerant quantum computation. The protocol's overhead, defined as the number of input magic states required per output magic state with an error rate below
ε, typically grows as
O(logγ(1/ε)). Achieving smaller overheads, i.e., smaller exponents
γ, is highly desirable; however, all existing protocols require polylogarithmically growing overheads with some
γ>0, and identifying the smallest achievable exponent
γ for distilling magic states of qubits has remained challenging. To address this issue, we develop magic state distillation protocols for qubits with efficient, polynomial-time decoding that achieve an
O(1) overhead, meaning the optimal exponent
γ=0; this improves over the previous best of
γ≈0.678 due to Hastings and Haah. In our construction, we employ algebraic geometry codes to explicitly present asymptotically good quantum codes for
210-dimensional qudits that support transversally implementable logical gates in the third level of the Clifford hierarchy. The use of asymptotically good codes with non-vanishing rate and relative distance leads to the constant overhead. These codes can be realised by representing each
210-dimensional qudit as a set of
10 qubits, using stabiliser operations on qubits. The
10-qubit magic states distilled with these codes can be converted to and from conventional magic states for the controlled-controlled-
Z (
CCZ) and
T gates on qubits with only a constant overhead loss, making it possible to achieve constant-overhead distillation of such standard magic states for qubits. These results resolve the fundamental open problem in quantum information theory concerning the construction of magic state distillation protocols with the optimal exponent.