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:2606.10430

Efficient Magic State Cultivation for $\sqrt{T}$ Gates

I-Chi Chen, Matheus da Silva Fonseca, Andrew Sornborger

quant-phSubmitted Jun 9, 2026• Announced Jun 10, 2026• 0 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Recently, experimental and theoretical quantum error correction methodology has seen remarkable breakthroughs. In particular, magic state cultivation has been shown to simplify magic-state preparation and make it feasible for near-term devices. However, recent research on magic state cultivation has focused primarily on the cultivation of $T\left| + \right>_L$. Only a few other magic state cultivation methods beyond $T\left| + \right>_L$ have been investigated. Here, we generalize phase kickback checks for magic states at arbitrary Clifford hierarchy levels in specific codes. We provide an example of cultivation of $\sqrt{T}\left| + \right>_L$ in the doubled color code and the corresponding escape strategy using lattice surgery from the color code to large rotated surface codes. Using state vector simulation for un-grown cultivation, we observe a strong consistence between $S\left| + \right>_L$ and $\sqrt{T}\left| + \right>_L$ cultivation's performance on the doubled color code. Finally, we discuss the application of the corresponding $\sqrt{T}\left| + \right>_L$ cultivation, incorporating the STAR architecture and $T$ gates, for early fault-tolerant quantum computing and its potential to shorten gate synthesis in the fully fault-tolerant quantum computing era.

Comments
11+11 pages, 8+7 figures, 4+5 tables.Comments welcome

Related papers

Efficient Magic State Factory Via Transversal Non-Clifford Gate

I-Chi Chen, Hrushikesh Pramod Patil, Huiyang Zhou +1 more

Magic-state preparation is a central component of fault-tolerant quantum computing. Recent theoretical and experimental successes in code-switch-based magic-state preparation have underscored the promise of these methods for quantum error correction. Similarly, magic-state cultivation has likewise been demonstrated in both numerical and experimental settings. However, a thorough comparison between magic-state cultivation and code-switch-based magic-state factories is still missing. In this work, we carry out end-to-end simulations of magic-state preparation using code switching and compare its resource requirements and performance against magic-state cultivation. As part of this analysis, we develop a lattice-surgery protocol for transfer between the doubled color code and the rotated surface code. We extend the complete code-switching protocol to the $d=5$ doubled color code and perform the corresponding end-to-end simulations. Finally, we propose two fault-tolerant magic-state preparation protocols that combine phase-kickback checks with a transversal non-Clifford gate.

quant-pharXiv:2606.16199•Jun 16, 2026•0 citations

STAR-Magic Mutation: Even More Efficient Analog Rotation Gates for Early Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computer

Riki Toshio, Shota Kanasugi, Jun Fujisaki +3 more

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 $\mathcal{O}(θ_L^{2(1-Θ(1/d))}p_{\text{ph}})$, while requiring only the ancillary space of a single surface code patch. Here, $θ_L$ is the logical rotation angle, $p_{\text{ph}}$ is the physical error rate, and $d$ is the code distance. This scaling marks a significant improvement over the previous state-of-the-art, $\mathcal{O}(θ_L p_{\text{ph}})$, making our protocol particularly powerful for implementing a sequence of small-angle rotation gates, like Trotter-based circuits. Notably, for $θ_L \lesssim 10^{-5}$, 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 $T$-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+$T$+$φ$ gate set, rather than the conventional Clifford+$T$ or Clifford+$φ$ 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 $p_{\text{ph}}=10^{-3}$.

quant-pharXiv:2603.22891•Mar 25, 2026•0 citations

Magic state cultivation on a superconducting quantum processor

Emma Rosenfeld, Craig Gidney, Gabrielle Roberts +292 more

Fault-tolerant quantum computing requires a universal gate set, but the necessary non-Clifford gates represent a significant resource cost for most quantum error correction architectures. Magic state cultivation offers an efficient alternative to resource-intensive distillation protocols; however, testing the proposal's assumptions represents a challenging departure from quantum memory experiments. We present an experimental study of magic state cultivation on a superconducting quantum processor. We implement cultivation, including code-switching into a surface code, and develop a fault-tolerant measurement protocol to bound the magic state fidelity. Cultivation reduces the error by a factor of 40, with a state fidelity of 0.9999(1) (retaining 8% of attempts). Our results experimentally establish magic state cultivation as a viable solution to one of quantum computing's most significant challenges.

quant-pharXiv:2512.13908•Science•Dec 17, 2025•0 citations

Cultivating logical catalysts for fault-tolerant dyadic phase rotations

Yichen Xu, Xiao Wang

We introduce a surface-code cultivation protocol for reusable logical catalyst states that implement exact fine dyadic phase gates $Z^{2^{-b}}$ by phase kickback. The catalyst is an eigenstate of a high-period Clifford circuit $U$, with a direct construction supported on $O(2^b)$ logical qubits. Once cultivated, each invocation implements the target phase through a controlled-$U$ gadget, removing Clifford+$T$ synthesis approximation error from the online gate and making the online non-Clifford depth independent of the target logical accuracy. As a concrete demonstration, we construct a catalyst for $\sqrt{T}=Z^{1/8}$, where $U$ is a nine-qubit brickwork Clifford circuit and controlled-$U$ consists of eight controlled-CNOTs. Starting from nine distance-three rotated-surface-code blocks, we cultivate the catalyst through logical-$U$ checks, syndrome extraction and postselection, code growth, and complementary-gap decoding. Due to the intrinsic fault tolerance of the phase read-out, a \emph{single} verification round already reaches the leading error-corrected scaling, in contrast to the repeated logical checks required when cultivating single-qubit magic states. A hybrid tensor-network and stabilizer simulation shows that, at physical error rate $p=10^{-3}$, the postselected catalyst can be grown to distance-seven rotated-surface-code blocks with logical leakage rate $\sim 10^{-6}$ using around seven expected attempts, and can be suppressed further with stronger postselection. Compared with existing protocols, our approach trades offline, phase-specific catalyst cultivation for exactness, reusability, and constant-depth online implementation of fixed fine dyadic phases in codes with restricted transversal gate sets.

quant-pharXiv:2606.27358•Jun 26, 2026•0 citations

Constant-depth magic state cultivation with Clifford measurements by gauging

Bence Hetényi, Benjamin J. Brown, Dominic J. Williamson

Magic states are a scarce resource for two-dimensional qubit stabilizer codes. Magic state cultivation was recently proposed to reduce the cost of magic state preparation by measuring the transversal Clifford operator of the color code. Cultivation achieves $\sim 10^{-9}$ logical error rates for the $d=5$ color code, with substantially lower space-time overhead than magic state distillation. However, due to the $\mathcal{O}(d)$ depth of the Clifford measurement circuit, magic state cultivation becomes impractical for $d>5$. Here, we perform logical $XS^\dagger$ measurements on the color code by gauging a transversal Clifford gate, resulting in a constant-depth logical measurement circuit. We employ repeated gauging measurements with post-selection rather than performing error correction on the Clifford stabilizer code that emerges during the gauging protocol, thus gaining simplicity at the cost of scalability. Our protocol requires a regular square grid connectivity and yields logical error rates comparable to magic state cultivation. The $d=7$ version of our protocol gives access to the $10^{-12}$ logical error rate regime at $0.05\%$ physical error rate while retaining more than $1\%$ of the shots after the equivalent of the cultivation stage.

quant-pharXiv:2603.05429•Physical Review Letters•Mar 6, 2026•0 citations

Low-Overhead Magic State Distillation with Color Codes

Seok-Hyung Lee, Felix Thomsen, Nicholas Fazio +2 more

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.

arXiv:2409.07707•PRX Quantum•May 30, 2025•11 citations
Efficient Magic State Cultivation for T\sqrt{T}T​ Gates
Recently, experimental and theoretical quantum error correction methodology has seen remarkable breakthroughs. In particular, magic state cultivation has been shown to simplify magic-state preparation and make it feasible for near-term devices. However, recent research on magic state cultivation has focused primarily on the cultivation of T∣+>LT\left| + \right>_LT∣+⟩L​. Only a few other magic state cultivation methods beyond T∣+>LT\left| + \right>_LT∣+⟩L​ have been investigated. Here, we generalize phase kickback checks for magic states at arbitrary Clifford hierarchy levels in specific codes. We provide an example of cultivation of T∣+>L\sqrt{T}\left| + \right>_LT​∣+⟩L​ in the doubled color code and the corresponding escape strategy using lattice surgery from the color code to large rotated surface codes. Using state vector simulation for un-grown cultivation, we observe a strong consistence between S∣+>LS\left| + \right>_LS∣+⟩L​ and T∣+>L\sqrt{T}\left| + \right>_LT​∣+⟩L​ cultivation's performance on the doubled color code. Finally, we discuss the application of the corresponding T∣+>L\sqrt{T}\left| + \right>_LT​∣+⟩L​ cultivation, incorporating the STAR architecture and TTT gates, for early fault-tolerant quantum computing and its potential to shorten gate synthesis in the fully fault-tolerant quantum computing era.
Magic-state preparation is a central component of fault-tolerant quantum computing. Recent theoretical and experimental successes in code-switch-based magic-state preparation have underscored the promise of these methods for quantum error correction. Similarly, magic-state cultivation has likewise been demonstrated in both numerical and experimental settings. However, a thorough comparison between magic-state cultivation and code-switch-based magic-state factories is still missing. In this work, we carry out end-to-end simulations of magic-state preparation using code switching and compare its resource requirements and performance against magic-state cultivation. As part of this analysis, we develop a lattice-surgery protocol for transfer between the doubled color code and the rotated surface code. We extend the complete code-switching protocol to the d=5d=5d=5 doubled color code and perform the corresponding end-to-end simulations. Finally, we propose two fault-tolerant magic-state preparation protocols that combine phase-kickback checks with a transversal non-Clifford gate.
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.
Fault-tolerant quantum computing requires a universal gate set, but the necessary non-Clifford gates represent a significant resource cost for most quantum error correction architectures. Magic state cultivation offers an efficient alternative to resource-intensive distillation protocols; however, testing the proposal's assumptions represents a challenging departure from quantum memory experiments. We present an experimental study of magic state cultivation on a superconducting quantum processor. We implement cultivation, including code-switching into a surface code, and develop a fault-tolerant measurement protocol to bound the magic state fidelity. Cultivation reduces the error by a factor of 40, with a state fidelity of 0.9999(1) (retaining 8% of attempts). Our results experimentally establish magic state cultivation as a viable solution to one of quantum computing's most significant challenges.
We introduce a surface-code cultivation protocol for reusable logical catalyst states that implement exact fine dyadic phase gates Z2−bZ^{2^{-b}}Z2−b by phase kickback. The catalyst is an eigenstate of a high-period Clifford circuit UUU, with a direct construction supported on O(2b)O(2^b)O(2b) logical qubits. Once cultivated, each invocation implements the target phase through a controlled-UUU gadget, removing Clifford+TTT synthesis approximation error from the online gate and making the online non-Clifford depth independent of the target logical accuracy. As a concrete demonstration, we construct a catalyst for T=Z1/8\sqrt{T}=Z^{1/8}T​=Z1/8, where UUU is a nine-qubit brickwork Clifford circuit and controlled-UUU consists of eight controlled-CNOTs. Starting from nine distance-three rotated-surface-code blocks, we cultivate the catalyst through logical-UUU checks, syndrome extraction and postselection, code growth, and complementary-gap decoding. Due to the intrinsic fault tolerance of the phase read-out, a \emph{single} verification round already reaches the leading error-corrected scaling, in contrast to the repeated logical checks required when cultivating single-qubit magic states. A hybrid tensor-network and stabilizer simulation shows that, at physical error rate p=10−3p=10^{-3}p=10−3, the postselected catalyst can be grown to distance-seven rotated-surface-code blocks with logical leakage rate ∼10−6\sim 10^{-6}∼10−6 using around seven expected attempts, and can be suppressed further with stronger postselection. Compared with existing protocols, our approach trades offline, phase-specific catalyst cultivation for exactness, reusability, and constant-depth online implementation of fixed fine dyadic phases in codes with restricted transversal gate sets.
Magic states are a scarce resource for two-dimensional qubit stabilizer codes. Magic state cultivation was recently proposed to reduce the cost of magic state preparation by measuring the transversal Clifford operator of the color code. Cultivation achieves ∼10−9\sim 10^{-9}∼10−9 logical error rates for the d=5d=5d=5 color code, with substantially lower space-time overhead than magic state distillation. However, due to the O(d)\mathcal{O}(d)O(d) depth of the Clifford measurement circuit, magic state cultivation becomes impractical for d>5d>5d>5. Here, we perform logical XS†XS^\daggerXS† measurements on the color code by gauging a transversal Clifford gate, resulting in a constant-depth logical measurement circuit. We employ repeated gauging measurements with post-selection rather than performing error correction on the Clifford stabilizer code that emerges during the gauging protocol, thus gaining simplicity at the cost of scalability. Our protocol requires a regular square grid connectivity and yields logical error rates comparable to magic state cultivation. The d=7d=7d=7 version of our protocol gives access to the 10−1210^{-12}10−12 logical error rate regime at 0.05%0.05\%0.05% physical error rate while retaining more than 1%1\%1% of the shots after the equivalent of the cultivation stage.
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.