Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Log inSign up
Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Blog
Job Board
Q3AS

© 2026 Aqora Quantum S.A.S.

TermsPrivacyLegal Notice

arXiv:2407.07394

MagicPool: Dealing with Magic State Distillation Failures on Large-Scale Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computer

Yutaka Hirano, Yasunari Suzuki, Keisuke Fujii

Published Jul 10, 2024• 1 citation
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Magic state distillation, which is a probabilistic process used to generate magic states, plays an important role in universal fault-tolerant quantum computers. On the other hand, to solve interesting problems, we need to run complex programs on fault-tolerant quantum computers, and hence, the system needs to use hardware resources efficiently. Taking advantage of parallelism is a major optimization strategy and compilers are responsible for performing optimizations to allow parallel processing. However, the probabilistic nature of magic state distillation is not compatible with compile-time optimizations and results in an additional run-time delay. To reduce the additional run-time delay, we propose introducing a pool of magic states. We run simulations of quantum circuits to verify the magnitude of the run-time delay and the usefulness of the mitigation approach. The experimental results show that the run-time delay is amplified by parallel processing, and pooling effectively reduces the run-time delay with a small spatial cost.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2407.07394

Related papers

Locality-Aware Pauli-Based Computation for Local Magic State Preparation

Yutaka Hirano, Keisuke Fujii

Magic state distillation, a process for preparing magic states needed to implement non-Clifford gates faulttolerantly, plays a crucial role in fault-tolerant quantum computation. Historically, it has been a major bottleneck, leading to the pursuit of computation schemes optimized for slow magic state preparation. Recent advances in magic state distillation have significantly reduced the overhead, enabling the simultaneous preparation of many magic states. However, the magic state transfer cost prevents the conventional layout from efficiently utilizing them, highlighting the need for an alternative scheme optimized for highly parallel quantum algorithms. In this study, we propose locality-aware Pauli-based computation, a novel compilation scheme that distills magic states in the computation area, aiming to reduce execution time by minimizing magic state transfer costs and improving locality. Numerical experiments on random circuit sampling and 2D Ising Hamiltonian simulation demonstrate that our scheme significantly reduces execution time-while incurring little or no additional spatial overhead-compared to sequential Pauli-based computation, a conventional computation scheme, and scales favorably with increasing qubit count.

arXiv:2504.12091•IEEE International Conference on Quantum Computing and Engineering (QCE)•Aug 30, 2025•4 citations

The robustness of magic state distillation against errors in Clifford gates

Tomas Jochym-O’Connor, Ya-Fei Yu, Bassam Helou +1 more

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.

arXiv:1205.6715•May 30, 2012•1 citation

The robustness of magic state distillation against errors in Clifford gates

Tomas Jochym-O’Connor, Ya-Fei Yu, Bassam Helou +1 more

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.

Quantum Information and Computation•May 1, 2013•17 citations

Efficient Magic State Distillation by Zero-Level Distillation

Tomohiro Itogawa, Yugo Takada, Yutaka Hirano +1 more

Magic state distillation (MSD) is an essential element for universal fault-tolerant quantum computing, which distills a high-fidelity magic state from noisy magic states using ideal (error-corrected) Clifford operations. For ideal Clifford operations, it needs to be performed on the logical qubits and hence incurs a large spatiotemporal overhead, which is one of the major bottlenecks for the realization of fault-tolerant quantum computers (FTQCs). Here we propose zero-level distillation, which prepares a high-fidelity logical magic state at the physical level, namely , using physical qubits and nearest-neighbor two-qubit gates on a square lattice. We develop a zero-level distillation circuit and show that distillation can be made even more efficient than the conventional sophisticated approaches with logical level distillations. The key idea involves the Knill -type distillation using the Steane code and its careful mapping to the square-lattice architecture with error detection. The distilled magic state on the Steane-code state is then teleported or converted to surface codes. We numerically find that the error rate of the logical magic state scales as approximately 100 × p 2 in terms of the physical error rate p . For example, with a physical error rate of p = 10 − 4 ( 10 − 3 ), the logical error rate is reduced to p L = 10 − 6 ( 10 − 4 ), resulting in an improvement of 2 (1) orders of magnitude. This contributes to reducing both space and time overhead for early FTQC as well as full-fledged FTQC combined with conventional multilevel distillation protocols.

arXiv:2403.03991•PRX Quantum•May 22, 2025•22 citations

Advances in compilation for quantum hardware -- A demonstration of magic state distillation and repeat-until-success protocols

Natalie C. Brown, John Peter Campora, Cassandra Granade +8 more

Fault-tolerant protocols enable large and precise quantum algorithms. Many such protocols rely on a feed-forward processing of data, enabled by a hybrid of quantum and classical logic. Representing the control structure of such programs can be a challenge. Here we explore two such fault-tolerant subroutines and analyze the performance of the subroutines using Quantum Intermediate Representation (QIR) as their underlying intermediate representation. First, we look at QIR's ability to leverage the LLVM compiler toolchain to unroll the quantum iteration logic required to perform magic state distillation on the $[[5,1,3]]$ quantum error-correcting code as originally introduced by Bravyi and Kitaev [Phys. Rev. A 71, 022316 (2005)]. This allows us to not only realize the first implementation of a real-time magic state distillation protocol on quantum hardware, but also demonstrate QIR's ability to optimize complex program structures without degrading machine performance. Next, we investigate a different fault-tolerant protocol that was first introduced by Paetznick and Svore [arXiv:1311.1074 (2013)], that reduces the amount of non-Clifford gates needed for a particular algorithm. We look at four different implementations of this two-stage repeat-until-success algorithm to analyze the performance changes as the results of programming choices. We find the QIR offers a viable representation for a compiled high-level program that performs nearly as well as a hand-optimized version written directly in quantum assembly. Both of these results demonstrate QIR's ability to accurately and efficiently expand the complexity of fault-tolerant protocols that can be realized today on quantum hardware.

arXiv:2310.12106•Oct 18, 2023•4 citations

Zero-level $CCZ$ Distillation

Tomohiro Itogawa, Yutaka Hirano, Yutaro Akahoshi +1 more

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 $T/T^\dagger$ operation of the $[[ 8,3,2 ]]$ code to fault-tolerantly encode the state $\overline{CCZ}|+++\rangle$, 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 $p_L \simeq 300 \times p^2$ 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.

quant-pharXiv:2605.21867•May 22, 2026•0 citations
Magic state distillation, which is a probabilistic process used to generate magic states, plays an important role in universal fault-tolerant quantum computers. On the other hand, to solve interesting problems, we need to run complex programs on fault-tolerant quantum computers, and hence, the system needs to use hardware resources efficiently. Taking advantage of parallelism is a major optimization strategy and compilers are responsible for performing optimizations to allow parallel processing. However, the probabilistic nature of magic state distillation is not compatible with compile-time optimizations and results in an additional run-time delay. To reduce the additional run-time delay, we propose introducing a pool of magic states. We run simulations of quantum circuits to verify the magnitude of the run-time delay and the usefulness of the mitigation approach. The experimental results show that the run-time delay is amplified by parallel processing, and pooling effectively reduces the run-time delay with a small spatial cost.
Magic state distillation, a process for preparing magic states needed to implement non-Clifford gates faulttolerantly, plays a crucial role in fault-tolerant quantum computation. Historically, it has been a major bottleneck, leading to the pursuit of computation schemes optimized for slow magic state preparation. Recent advances in magic state distillation have significantly reduced the overhead, enabling the simultaneous preparation of many magic states. However, the magic state transfer cost prevents the conventional layout from efficiently utilizing them, highlighting the need for an alternative scheme optimized for highly parallel quantum algorithms. In this study, we propose locality-aware Pauli-based computation, a novel compilation scheme that distills magic states in the computation area, aiming to reduce execution time by minimizing magic state transfer costs and improving locality. Numerical experiments on random circuit sampling and 2D Ising Hamiltonian simulation demonstrate that our scheme significantly reduces execution time-while incurring little or no additional spatial overhead-compared to sequential Pauli-based computation, a conventional computation scheme, and scales favorably with increasing qubit count.
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.
Magic state distillation (MSD) is an essential element for universal fault-tolerant quantum computing, which distills a high-fidelity magic state from noisy magic states using ideal (error-corrected) Clifford operations. For ideal Clifford operations, it needs to be performed on the logical qubits and hence incurs a large spatiotemporal overhead, which is one of the major bottlenecks for the realization of fault-tolerant quantum computers (FTQCs). Here we propose zero-level distillation, which prepares a high-fidelity logical magic state at the physical level, namely , using physical qubits and nearest-neighbor two-qubit gates on a square lattice. We develop a zero-level distillation circuit and show that distillation can be made even more efficient than the conventional sophisticated approaches with logical level distillations. The key idea involves the Knill -type distillation using the Steane code and its careful mapping to the square-lattice architecture with error detection. The distilled magic state on the Steane-code state is then teleported or converted to surface codes. We numerically find that the error rate of the logical magic state scales as approximately 100 × p 2 in terms of the physical error rate p . For example, with a physical error rate of p = 10 − 4 ( 10 − 3 ), the logical error rate is reduced to p L = 10 − 6 ( 10 − 4 ), resulting in an improvement of 2 (1) orders of magnitude. This contributes to reducing both space and time overhead for early FTQC as well as full-fledged FTQC combined with conventional multilevel distillation protocols.
Fault-tolerant protocols enable large and precise quantum algorithms. Many such protocols rely on a feed-forward processing of data, enabled by a hybrid of quantum and classical logic. Representing the control structure of such programs can be a challenge. Here we explore two such fault-tolerant subroutines and analyze the performance of the subroutines using Quantum Intermediate Representation (QIR) as their underlying intermediate representation. First, we look at QIR's ability to leverage the LLVM compiler toolchain to unroll the quantum iteration logic required to perform magic state distillation on the [[5,1,3]][[5,1,3]][[5,1,3]] quantum error-correcting code as originally introduced by Bravyi and Kitaev [Phys. Rev. A 71, 022316 (2005)]. This allows us to not only realize the first implementation of a real-time magic state distillation protocol on quantum hardware, but also demonstrate QIR's ability to optimize complex program structures without degrading machine performance. Next, we investigate a different fault-tolerant protocol that was first introduced by Paetznick and Svore [arXiv:1311.1074 (2013)], that reduces the amount of non-Clifford gates needed for a particular algorithm. We look at four different implementations of this two-stage repeat-until-success algorithm to analyze the performance changes as the results of programming choices. We find the QIR offers a viable representation for a compiled high-level program that performs nearly as well as a hand-optimized version written directly in quantum assembly. Both of these results demonstrate QIR's ability to accurately and efficiently expand the complexity of fault-tolerant protocols that can be realized today on quantum hardware.
Zero-level CCZCCZCCZ Distillation
Magic state distillation is a key component of fault-tolerant quantum computation, as it enables the implementation of non-Clifford gates such as the TTT gate and the CCZCCZCCZ 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 CCZCCZCCZ magic state using only physical qubits on a two-dimensional square lattice with nearest-neighbor interactions. Our method leverages the transversal T/T†T/T^\daggerT/T† operation of the [[8,3,2]][[ 8,3,2 ]][[8,3,2]] code to fault-tolerantly encode the state CCZ‾∣+++⟩\overline{CCZ}|+++\rangleCCZ∣+++⟩, 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×p2p_L \simeq 300 \times p^2pL​≃300×p2 with respect to the physical error rate ppp. For example, the proposed method improves the logical error rate by approximately one and two orders of magnitude at p=10−3p = 10^{-3}p=10−3 and p=10−4p = 10^{-4}p=10−4, respectively, compared to conventional seven-TTT-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 CCZCCZCCZ-state distillation in early fault-tolerant quantum computation and offers a new direction toward resource-efficient physical-level magic state distillation beyond conventional TTT-state generation.