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arXiv:2003.02717 · Proceedings of the Royal Society A Mathematical Physical and Engineering Sciences

Magic state distillation with the ternary Golay code

Shiroman Prakash

Published Sep 1, 2020• 18 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

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 distil 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 distils the ‘second-most magic’ qutrit state, the Norell state, with quadratic error suppression and an equally high threshold to depolarizing noise.

DOI
10.1098/rspa.2020.0187

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The main focus of this thesis is to explore the advantages of using higher-dimensional quantum systems (qudits) as building blocks for fault-tolerant quantum computation. In particular, we investigate the two main essential ingredients of many state-of-the-art fault-tolerant schemes [133], which are magic state distillation and topological error correction. The theory for both of these components is well established for the qubit case, but little has been known for the generalised qudit case. For magic state distillation, we first present a general numerical approach that can be used to investigate the distillation properties of any stabilizer code. We use this approach to study small threedimensional (qutrit) codes and classify, for the first time, new types of qutrit magic states. We then provide an analytic study of a family of distillation protocols based on the quantum Reed-Muller codes. We discover a particular five-dimensional code that, by many measures, outperforms all known qubit codes. For the topological error correction, we study the qudit toric code serving as a quantum memory. For this purpose we examine an efficient renormalization group decoder to estimate the error correction threshold. We find that when the qudit toric code is subject to a generalised bit-flip noise, and for a sufficiently high dimension, a threshold of 30% can be obtained under perfect decoding.

•Mar 28, 2014•3 citations
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 distil 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 distils the ‘second-most magic’ qutrit state, the Norell state, with quadratic error suppression and an equally high threshold to depolarizing noise.
We present applications of quantum quadratic residue codes in magic state distillation. This includes showing that existing codes which are known to distill magic states, like the 555-qubit perfect code, the 777-qubit Steane code, and the 111111-qutrit and 232323-qubit Golay codes, are equivalent to certain quantum quadratic residue codes. We also present new examples of quantum quadratic residue codes that distill qubit TTT states and qutrit Strange states with high thresholds, and we show that there are infinitely many quantum quadratic residue codes that distill TTT states with a non-trivial threshold. All of these codes, including the codes with the highest currently known thresholds for TTT state and Strange state distillation, are unified under the umbrella of quantum quadratic residue codes.
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[[n,1]]_3[[n,1]]3​ qutrit stabilizer codes with a complete set of transversal Clifford gates for n≤23n\leq 23n≤23, and all [[n,1]]3[[n,1]]_3[[n,1]]3​ stabilizer codes with a transversal H2H^2H2 gate with n≤9n \leq 9n≤9 qudits. For n=23n=23n=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.
We show that using qutrits rather than qubits leads to a substantial reduction in the overhead cost associated with an approach to fault-tolerant quantum computing known as magic state distillation. We construct a family of [[9m−k,k,2]]3 triorthogonal qutrit error-correcting codes for any positive integers m and k with k≤3m−2 that are suitable for magic state distillation. In magic state distillation, the number of ancillae required to produce a magic state with target error rate ϵ is O(logγ⁡ϵ−1) , where the yield parameter γ characterizes the overhead cost. For k=3m−2 , our codes have γ=log2⁡(2+63m−2) , which tends to 1 as m→∞ . Moreover, the [[20,7,2]]3 qutrit code that arises from our construction when m=3 already has a yield parameter of 1.51 which outperforms all known qubit triorthogonal codes of size less than a few hundred qubits.
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 applying operations from the Clifford group and measurements in the Pauli basis, the fidelity of noisy prepared magic states can be increased arbitrarily close to a pure magic state [1]. We investigate the robustness of magic state distillation to perturbations of the initial states to arbitrary locations in the Bloch sphere due to noise. Additionally, we consider a depolarizing noise model on the quantum gates in the decoding section of the distillation protocol and demonstrate its effect on the convergence rate and threshold value. Finally, we establish that faulty magic state distillation is more efficient than fault-tolerance-assisted magic state distillation at low error rates due to the large overhead in the number of quantum gates and qubits required in a fault-tolerance architecture. The ability to perform magic state distillation with noisy gates leads us to conclude that this could be a realistic scheme for future small-scale quantum computing devices as fault-tolerance need only be used in the final steps of the protocol.
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 applying operations from the Clifford group and measurements in the Pauli basis, the fidelity of noisy prepared magic states can be increased arbitrarily close to a pure magic state~\cite{Bravyi}. We investigate the robustness of magic state distillation to perturbations of the initial states to arbitrary locations in the Bloch sphere due to noise. Additionally, we consider a depolarizing noise model on the quantum gates in the decoding section of the distillation protocol and demonstrate its effect on the convergence rate and threshold value. Finally, we establish that faulty magic state distillation is more efficient than fault-tolerance-assisted magic state distillation at low error rates due to the large overhead in the number of quantum gates and qubits required in a fault-tolerance architecture. The ability to perform magic state distillation with noisy gates leads us to conclude that this could be a realistic scheme for future small-scale quantum computing devices as fault-tolerance need only be used in the final steps of the protocol.
The main focus of this thesis is to explore the advantages of using higher-dimensional quantum systems (qudits) as building blocks for fault-tolerant quantum computation. In particular, we investigate the two main essential ingredients of many state-of-the-art fault-tolerant schemes [133], which are magic state distillation and topological error correction. The theory for both of these components is well established for the qubit case, but little has been known for the generalised qudit case. For magic state distillation, we first present a general numerical approach that can be used to investigate the distillation properties of any stabilizer code. We use this approach to study small threedimensional (qutrit) codes and classify, for the first time, new types of qutrit magic states. We then provide an analytic study of a family of distillation protocols based on the quantum Reed-Muller codes. We discover a particular five-dimensional code that, by many measures, outperforms all known qubit codes. For the topological error correction, we study the qudit toric code serving as a quantum memory. For this purpose we examine an efficient renormalization group decoder to estimate the error correction threshold. We find that when the qudit toric code is subject to a generalised bit-flip noise, and for a sufficiently high dimension, a threshold of 30% can be obtained under perfect decoding.