Abstract Fault-tolerant quantum computing promises significant computational speedup over classical computing for a variety of important problems. One of the biggest challenges for realizing fault-tolerant quantum computing is preparing magic states with sufficiently low error rates. Magic state distillation is one of the most efficient schemes for preparing high-quality magic states. However, since magic state distillation circuits are not fault-tolerant, all the operations in the distillation circuits must be encoded in a large distance error-correcting code, resulting in a significant resource overhead. Here, we propose a fault-tolerant scheme for directly preparing high-quality magic states, which makes magic state distillation unnecessary. In particular, we introduce a concept that we call redundant ancilla encoding. The latter combined with flag qubits allows for circuits to both measure stabilizer generators of some code, while also being able to measure global operators to fault-tolerantly prepare magic states, all using nearest neighbor interactions. We apply such schemes to a planar architecture of the triangular color code family and demonstrate that our scheme requires at least an order of magnitude fewer qubits and space–time overhead compared to the most competitive magic state distillation schemes. Since our scheme requires only nearest-neighbor interactions in a planar architecture, it is suitable for various quantum computing platforms currently under development.
One of the major challenges in realizing fault-tolerant quantum computers (FTQCs) is the requirement for a large number of physical qubits. To address this issue, high-rate quantum error correcting codes, which efficiently embed logical qubits into physical qubits, have recently attracted considerable attention. Among such codes, quantum BCH codes, which offer both high rates and large code distances, are promising yet underexplored candidates. However, no fault-tolerant ancilla preparation method specialized for this class had been established. We employ a two-stage approach (non-fault-tolerant preparation + entanglement distillation) for ancilla preparation. We then propose a framework for designing low-overhead distillation method that strategically leverages the cyclic symmetry of quantum BCH codes to determine which non-fault-tolerant circuits can successfully produce a fault-tolerant state. Numerical simulations on several high-performance quantum BCH codes up to 127 qubits demonstrate that our method achieves lower spatial overhead and logical error rates than conventional distillation circuits. Furthermore, we evaluated the logical error rates under a circuit-level noise model, and obtained performance benchmarks in realistic settings. This efficient state preparation technique is expected to contribute to the early realization of practical FTQCs, particularly on highly connected quantum platforms such as neutral atom systems.
Magic state distillation is one of the leading candidates for implementing universal fault-tolerant logical gates. However, the distillation circuits themselves are not fault-tolerant, so there is additional cost to first implement encoded Clifford gates with negligible error. In this paper we present a scheme to fault-tolerantly and directly prepare magic states using flag qubits. One of these schemes requires only three ancilla qubits, even with noisy Clifford gates. We compare the physical qubit and gate cost of our scheme to the magic state distillation protocol of Meier, Eastin, and Knill (MEK), which is efficient and uses a small stabilizer circuit. For low enough noise rates, we show that in some regimes the overhead can be improved by several orders of magnitude compared to the MEK scheme which uses Clifford operations encoded in the codes considered in this work.
Fault-tolerant preparation of non-Clifford resource states is a major contributor to the overhead of quantum computation, motivating protocols that achieve high output fidelity with minimal qubit and circuit costs. We introduce a low-cost magic-state preparation protocol in which the choice of stabilizer generators is co-designed with the flag gadgets, allowing the syndrome-extraction circuit itself to filter correlated faults across a non-Clifford layer. The protocol prepares a logical plus state in the 15-qubit quantum Reed-Muller code, applies a transversal T gate, and gauge-fixes the same register into the seven-qubit Steane code. By reorganizing equivalent Z-type stabilizer generators into jointly flagged measurement groups, the protocol eliminates all accepted logical-error contributions arising from one or two circuit faults under destructive error detection. Under a uniform circuit-level depolarizing noise model, the postselected infidelity is
210.2p3+O(p4). At
p=10−3, exact low-order enumeration combined with stratified sampling bounds the infidelity by
2.2×10−7 at 99.9% joint confidence, while retaining an acceptance probability of 86.9%. The complete circuit requires only 19 qubits and 82 CNOT gates. These results demonstrate that stabilizer-generator design can substantially reduce the cost of postselected magic-state preparation, although corrected operation and the fidelity of an unmeasured output block require separate analysis.
Fault-tolerant implementation of non-Clifford gates is a major challenge for achieving universal fault-tolerant quantum computing with quantum error-correcting codes. Magic state distillation is the most well-studied method for this but requires significant resources. Hence, it is crucial to tailor and optimize magic state distillation for specific codes from both logical- and physical-level perspectives. In this work, we perform such optimization for two-dimensional color codes, which are promising due to their higher encoding rates compared to surface codes, transversal implementation of Clifford gates, and efficient lattice surgery. We propose two carefully designed distillation schemes based on the 15-to-1 distillation circuit and lattice surgery, differing in their methods for handling faulty rotations. Our first scheme employs faulty T measurement, achieving infidelities of O ( p 3 ) for physical noise strength p . To achieve lower infidelities, our second scheme integrates distillation with “cultivation” (a distillation-free approach to fault tolerantly prepare magic states through transversal Clifford measurements). Our second scheme achieves significantly lower infidelities (e.g., approximately 2 × 10 − 16 at p = 10 − 3 ), surpassing the capabilities of both cultivation and single-level distillation. Notably, to reach a given target infidelity, our schemes require approximately 2 orders of magnitude fewer resources than the previous best magic-state-distillation schemes for color codes.
Quantum error correction allows one to make quantum computers fault-tolerant against unavoidable errors due to decoherence and imperfect physical gate operations. However, the fault-tolerant quantum computation requires impractically large computational resources for useful applications. This is a current major obstacle to the realization of a quantum computer. In particular, magic state distillation, which is a standard approach to universality, consumes the most resources in fault-tolerant quantum computation. For the resource problem, here we propose step-by-step magic state encoding for concatenated quantum codes, where magic states are encoded step by step from the physical level to the logical one. To manage errors during the encoding, we carefully use error detection. Since the sizes of intermediate codes are small, it is expected that the resource overheads will become lower than previous approaches based on the distillation at the logical level. Our simulation results suggest that the resource requirements for a logical magic state will become comparable to those for a single logical controlled-NOT gate. Thus, the present method opens a new possibility for efficient fault-tolerant quantum computation.
Magic state distillation is a key component of fault-tolerant quantum computation, as it enables the implementation of non-Clifford gates such as the
T gate and the
CCZ gate via gate teleportation. However, conventional distillation protocols require a large number of logical qubits and introduce substantial spatial and temporal overhead, posing a significant bottleneck for scalable fault-tolerant quantum computation. In this work, we propose a zero-level distillation protocol that efficiently generates a high-fidelity logical
CCZ magic state using only physical qubits on a two-dimensional square lattice with nearest-neighbor interactions. Our method leverages the transversal
T/T† operation of the
[[8,3,2]] code to fault-tolerantly encode the state
CCZ∣+++⟩, which is subsequently teleported to three surface-code logical qubits via lattice surgery. To enable teleportation between codes with different distances, we introduce adaptively initialized teleportation (AIT), a tailored initialization procedure for the surface code. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the logical error rate scales as
pL≃300×p2 with respect to the physical error rate
p. For example, the proposed method improves the logical error rate by approximately one and two orders of magnitude at
p=10−3 and
p=10−4, respectively, compared to conventional seven-
T-gate approaches. The distillation circuit requires only 22 physical qubits, 3 logical qubits, and a circuit depth of 24, reducing the space-time overhead by a factor of approximately 5-10 compared to previous methods. This result highlights the practicality of
CCZ-state distillation in early fault-tolerant quantum computation and offers a new direction toward resource-efficient physical-level magic state distillation beyond conventional
T-state generation.