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arXiv:2605.31544

More efficient Clifford+T synthesis for small-angle rotations and application to Trotterization

Marius Bothe, Christoph Sünderhauf, Michael J. Witham, Earl T. Campbell, Nick S. Blunt

quant-phSubmitted May 29, 2026• Announced Jun 1, 2026• 0 citations• Revised Jun 11, 2026 (v2)
v1 · May 29, 2026v2 · Jun 11, 2026
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Abstract

Clifford+T synthesis of rotation gates is an important routine in fault-tolerant quantum compilation. While Clifford+T synthesis is scalable, it has a high overhead of tens of T gates per rotation in practice, translating to high resource estimates for many fault-tolerant algorithms. However, these well-known results, including those using probabilistic mixtures [Quantum 7, 1208 (2023)], are independent of the rotation angle $θ$, requiring $O(\log 1/δ)$ T gates. We show that it is possible to do much better for small angles, reducing the T cost to $\tilde{O}(θ^2/δ)$, and returning to existing $O(\log1/δ)$ results in the worst case. This is particularly important since many algorithms, such as Trotterization, are dominated by small-angle rotations. Further, we perform a detailed theoretical and numerical study of quasi-probabilities, which can further reduce the total T cost of large circuits by orders of magnitude with only a small overhead in sample complexity. We also develop a scheme based on quasi-probability mixtures of Clifford+T fallback channels. We derive new $θ$-dependent formulas that can be used for resource estimation of fault-tolerant quantum algorithms. As an application of our results, we show that the gate cost of Trotterization circuits compiled to a Clifford+T gate set is constant in the small Trotter step size limit, and can be reduced by orders of magnitude even for large step sizes. The cost of fault-tolerant Trotterization for a variety of applications should be re-examined in light of these results. Our work dispels the widely-stated claim that Clifford+T rotation synthesis has a high cost independent of $θ$, and further develops a scalable quasi-probability method for rotation synthesis. We also expect our results to bring forward useful early fault-tolerant quantum computing by reducing required magic state resources.

Comments
43 pages, 12 figures

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We introduce STAR-magic mutation, an efficient protocol for implementing logical rotation gates on early fault-tolerant quantum computers. This protocol judiciously combines two of the latest state preparation protocols: transversal multi-rotation protocol and magic state cultivation. It achieves a logical rotation gate with a favorable error scaling of O(θL2(1−Θ(1/d))pph)\mathcal{O}(θ_L^{2(1-Θ(1/d))}p_{\text{ph}})O(θL2(1−Θ(1/d))​pph​), while requiring only the ancillary space of a single surface code patch. Here, θLθ_LθL​ is the logical rotation angle, pphp_{\text{ph}}pph​ is the physical error rate, and ddd is the code distance. This scaling marks a significant improvement over the previous state-of-the-art, O(θLpph)\mathcal{O}(θ_L p_{\text{ph}})O(θL​pph​), making our protocol particularly powerful for implementing a sequence of small-angle rotation gates, like Trotter-based circuits. Notably, for θL≲10−5θ_L \lesssim 10^{-5}θL​≲10−5, our protocol achieves a two-order-of-magnitude reduction in both the execution time and the error rate of analog rotation gates compared to the standard TTT-gate synthesis using cultivated magic states. Building upon this protocol, we also propose a novel quantum computing architecture designed for early fault-tolerant quantum computers, dubbed ``STAR ver.~3". It employs a refined circuit compilation strategy based on Clifford+TTT+φφφ gate set, rather than the conventional Clifford+TTT or Clifford+φφφ gate sets. We establish a theoretical bound on the feasible circuit size on this architecture and illustrate its capabilities by analyzing the spacetime costs for simulating the dynamics of quantum many-body systems. Specifically, we demonstrate that our architecture can simulate biologically-relevant molecules or lattice models at scales beyond the reach of exact classical simulation, with only a few hundred thousand physical qubits, even assuming a realistic error rate of pph=10−3p_{\text{ph}}=10^{-3}pph​=10−3.
Quantum error correction is essential for achieving practical quantum computing but has a significant computational overhead. Among fault-tolerant (FT) gate operations, non-Clifford gates, such as T, are particularly expensive due to their reliance on magic state distillation. These costly T gates appear frequently in FT circuits as many quantum algorithms require arbitrary single-qubit rotations, such as Rx and Rz gates, which must be decomposed into a sequence of T and Clifford gates. In many quantum circuits, Rx and Rz gates can be fused to form a single U3 unitary. However, existing synthesis methods, such as gridsynth, rely on indirect decompositions, requiring separate Rz decompositions that result in a threefold increase in T count.
Abstract As quantum computing progresses towards the early fault-tolerant regime, quantum error correction will play a crucial role in protecting qubits and enabling logical Clifford operations. However, the number of logical qubits will initially remain limited, posing challenges for resource-intensive tasks like magic state distillation. It is therefore essential to develop efficient methods for implementing non-Clifford operations, such as small-angle rotations, to maximise the computational capabilities of devices within these constraints. In this work, we introduce mitigated magic dilution (MMD) as an approach to synthesise small-angle rotations by employing quantum error mitigation techniques to sample logical Clifford circuits given noisy encoded magic states. We explore the utility of our approach for the simulation of the 2D Fermi–Hubbard model. We identify evolution time regimes where MMD outperforms state-of-the-art synthesis techniques in the number of noisy encoded magic states required for square lattices up to size 8 × 8 . Moreover, we demonstrate that our method can provide a practical advantage that is quantified by a better-than-quadratic improvement in the resource requirements for small-angle rotations over classical simulators. This work paves the way for early fault-tolerant demonstrations on devices supporting millions of quantum operations, the so-called MegaQuOp regime.
Implementing arbitrary-angle rotation gates is a fundamental task in Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing (FTQC). Over the past decade, researchers have focused on minimizing theT\mathbf{T}T-count in the Clifford+T decomposition based on the Solovay-Kitaev theorem. Recently, however, the advances in T-gate preparation techniques known as the zero-level distillation have significantly reduced the cost ofTTTgates, and the main research focus has been shifted to simpler and more efficient synthesis protocols. In this paper, we propose a method to prepare the magic state for arbitrary-angleRZ\mathbf{R Z}RZgates using the Linear Combination of Unitaries (LCU) framework, where the RZ gate is represented as a linear combination ofIIIand iZ with positive integer coefficients. The unique feature of our protocol is that for angles whose tangent is rational, our protocol can prepare the magic state with no approximation error. Using this property, our protocol is expected to improve the accuracy of high-precision quantum algorithms. Moreover, the number of Clifford+T gates is proportional to the number of ancilla qubits, which is the same order as the previous methods. We also address the issue of the probabilistic behavior of the magic state preparation and injection and show that these issues can be mitigated by parallelizing the preparation process and combining our protocol with other approximation methods.
Resource-efficient and high-precision approximate synthesis of quantum circuits expressed in the Clifford+T gate set is vital for Fault-Tolerant quantum computing.Efficient optimal methods are known for single-qubit R Z unitaries, otherwise the problem is generally intractable.Search-based methods, like simulated annealing, empirically generate low resource cost approximate implementations of general multi-qubit unitaries so long as low precision (Hilbert-Schmidt distances of ε ≥ 10 -2 ) can be tolerated.These algorithms build up circuits that directly invert target unitaries.We instead leverage search-based methods to first approximately diagonalize a unitary, then perform the inversion analytically.This lets difficult continuous rotations be bypassed and handled in a postprocessing step.Our approach improves both the implementation precision and run time of synthesis algorithms by orders of magnitude when evaluated on unitaries from real quantum algorithms.On benchmarks previously synthesizable only with analytical techniques like the Quantum Shannon Decomposition, diagonalization uses an average of 95% fewer non-Clifford gates.