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arXiv:2609.19116

Comparing magic state cultivation methods using matrix product states

Tom Hartweg, Asier Piñeiro Orioli

quant-phSubmitted Sep 16, 2026• Announced Sep 17, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

Magic state cultivation prepares high-fidelity magic states at low expected space-time costs; however, the exact performance of some schemes is unsettled due to the difficulty in simulating non-Clifford circuits. Here, we use matrix-product states (MPS) based methods to compute the exact performance of two types of fold-transversal cultivation schemes: (i) the Sahay et al method based on the regular surface code S gate, and (ii) a method we propose based on a partially fault-tolerant fold-transversal S gate. We show that for the former protocol at $d=5$, the $|T\rangle$ output reaches similar logical error rates to the $|S\rangle$ output, traditionally used as a cheap full Clifford proxy. This contrasts with the $\sim10\times$ discrepancy reported for the $d=5$ colour-code scheme of Gidney et al. We also find that our new $d=5$ scheme has $\sim1.3\times$ lower expected space-time cost while still reaching $10^{-9}$ logical error rate. We show that MPS and Clifford-augmented MPS (CAMPS) perform on par with or even better than the recently introduced near-Clifford simulator Clifft on the hardest $d=5$ regular surface code scheme. Additionally, to speed up simulation, we propose a new pre-screening method based on simple Pauli propagation, lowering by up to three orders of magnitude the required number of exact simulations, and use several simulator-agnostic sampling methods such as subset sampling.

Related papers

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

Efficient Magic State Cultivation on R P 2

Zi-Han Chen, Ming-Cheng Chen, Chao-Yang Lu +1 more

Preparation of high-fidelity logical magic states is crucial for fault-tolerant quantum computation. Among previous attempts to reduce the substantial cost of magic state preparation, magic state cultivation (MSC) [Gidney , Magic state cultivation: growing T states as cheap as CNOT gates, arXiv:2409.17595], a recently proposed protocol for logical T state preparation without magic state distillation, achieves state-of-the-art efficiency. Inspired by this work [Gidney , Magic state cultivation: growing T states as cheap as CNOT gates, arXiv:2409.17595], we propose a MSC procedure that can produce logical T states on the rotated surface code at a further reduced cost. To maintain high efficiency throughout our protocol, we design structured codes along with compact circuits bridging between them. More specifically, we construct a code family, the RP code, by putting the rotated surface code on R P 2 (a two-dimensional manifold), as well as two self-dual Calderbank-Shor-Steane codes, named SRP-3 and SRP-5, respectively. In our MSC protocol, we start with a cultivation process, in which a high-fidelity T state is prepared on a small RP code with distance 3 or 5. Then, to preserve the logical T state, we use an efficient and easy-to-decode expansion stage to grow a small RP code to a larger rotated surface code in one syndrome extraction (SE) round. The RP code serves as an efficient transfer station with efficient SE circuits and compact interfaces between the SRP-3 (or SRP-5) code—used in the cultivation process to efficiently verify the correctness of the logical T state—and larger rotated surface codes for preserving the prepared logical T state. Our MSC protocol utilizes nonlocal connectivity, available on both neutral atom array and ion trap platforms. According to our Monte Carlo sampling results, our MSC protocol requires about an order of magnitude smaller space-time volume to reach a target logical error rate of around 10 − 9 compared to the original MSC protocol.

arXiv:2503.18657•PRX Quantum•Nov 19, 2025•3 citations

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

Exact logical error rates for magic state cultivation

Kwok Ho Wan, Ainhoa Zapirain

We compute exactly the acceptance and logical error rates for the distance $d=3$ and $d=5$ magic state cultivation circuits from Clifft [arXiv:2604.27058] and SOFT [arXiv:2512.23037] using Pauli propagation and binary tensor contraction. Actual $T$-gates are studied, not the $S$-gate proxy used for sampling. The calculation includes every fault order at several circuit-level noise strengths ($p$). We provide a series expansion form to the logical error rates, through order $(p/(1-p))^{10}$. The analytical results recover the numerical values from Clifft and SOFT at both $d=3$ and $d=5$ to within their sampling uncertainty. Then, we show that the $d=3$ and $d=5$ circuits actually have fault distances of $d_{\text{fault}}=2$ and $d_{\text{fault}}=3$ respectively, explaining the similar distance degrading effects from the companion code of [Quantum 10, 2134 (2026)].

quant-pharXiv:2609.18922•Sep 17, 2026•0 citations

The practical cost of magic state cultivation

Rohan Mehta, Varun Menon, Hengyun Zhou +2 more

Magic state cultivation is a promising method for preparing high-fidelity non-Clifford resource states - a central component of fault-tolerant quantum computing - with low spacetime overhead. In benchmarking cultivation, existing resource estimates assume access to noiseless transversal measurement of the output magic state to allow for postselection during the final escape stage of the cultivation process. However, such measurements would destroy the magic state and are therefore unavailable during computation. We develop an open-boundary postselection method, Caliper, that uses only nondestructive mid-circuit syndrome information and substantially outperforms existing methods operating under these constraints. In some regimes, our postselection method uniquely recovers the resource efficiency of prior estimates. However, in other cases, we observe a tradeoff. At spacetime costs reported in previous works, the achievable logical error rates can be orders of magnitude higher, and recovering the reported logical error rate requires substantially larger codes and longer escape stages. Our results highlight how practical considerations involving mid-circuit postselection can impact the design and performance of magic state cultivation protocols.

quant-pharXiv:2610.06828•Oct 6, 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 prepares high-fidelity magic states at low expected space-time costs; however, the exact performance of some schemes is unsettled due to the difficulty in simulating non-Clifford circuits. Here, we use matrix-product states (MPS) based methods to compute the exact performance of two types of fold-transversal cultivation schemes: (i) the Sahay et al method based on the regular surface code S gate, and (ii) a method we propose based on a partially fault-tolerant fold-transversal S gate. We show that for the former protocol at d=5d=5d=5, the ∣T⟩|T\rangle∣T⟩ output reaches similar logical error rates to the ∣S⟩|S\rangle∣S⟩ output, traditionally used as a cheap full Clifford proxy. This contrasts with the ∼10×\sim10\times∼10× discrepancy reported for the d=5d=5d=5 colour-code scheme of Gidney et al. We also find that our new d=5d=5d=5 scheme has ∼1.3×\sim1.3\times∼1.3× lower expected space-time cost while still reaching 10−910^{-9}10−9 logical error rate. We show that MPS and Clifford-augmented MPS (CAMPS) perform on par with or even better than the recently introduced near-Clifford simulator Clifft on the hardest d=5d=5d=5 regular surface code scheme. Additionally, to speed up simulation, we propose a new pre-screening method based on simple Pauli propagation, lowering by up to three orders of magnitude the required number of exact simulations, and use several simulator-agnostic sampling methods such as subset sampling.
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.
Preparation of high-fidelity logical magic states is crucial for fault-tolerant quantum computation. Among previous attempts to reduce the substantial cost of magic state preparation, magic state cultivation (MSC) [Gidney , Magic state cultivation: growing T states as cheap as CNOT gates, arXiv:2409.17595], a recently proposed protocol for logical T state preparation without magic state distillation, achieves state-of-the-art efficiency. Inspired by this work [Gidney , Magic state cultivation: growing T states as cheap as CNOT gates, arXiv:2409.17595], we propose a MSC procedure that can produce logical T states on the rotated surface code at a further reduced cost. To maintain high efficiency throughout our protocol, we design structured codes along with compact circuits bridging between them. More specifically, we construct a code family, the RP code, by putting the rotated surface code on R P 2 (a two-dimensional manifold), as well as two self-dual Calderbank-Shor-Steane codes, named SRP-3 and SRP-5, respectively. In our MSC protocol, we start with a cultivation process, in which a high-fidelity T state is prepared on a small RP code with distance 3 or 5. Then, to preserve the logical T state, we use an efficient and easy-to-decode expansion stage to grow a small RP code to a larger rotated surface code in one syndrome extraction (SE) round. The RP code serves as an efficient transfer station with efficient SE circuits and compact interfaces between the SRP-3 (or SRP-5) code—used in the cultivation process to efficiently verify the correctness of the logical T state—and larger rotated surface codes for preserving the prepared logical T state. Our MSC protocol utilizes nonlocal connectivity, available on both neutral atom array and ion trap platforms. According to our Monte Carlo sampling results, our MSC protocol requires about an order of magnitude smaller space-time volume to reach a target logical error rate of around 10 − 9 compared to the original MSC protocol.
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 compute exactly the acceptance and logical error rates for the distance d=3d=3d=3 and d=5d=5d=5 magic state cultivation circuits from Clifft [arXiv:2604.27058] and SOFT [arXiv:2512.23037] using Pauli propagation and binary tensor contraction. Actual TTT-gates are studied, not the SSS-gate proxy used for sampling. The calculation includes every fault order at several circuit-level noise strengths (ppp). We provide a series expansion form to the logical error rates, through order (p/(1−p))10(p/(1-p))^{10}(p/(1−p))10. The analytical results recover the numerical values from Clifft and SOFT at both d=3d=3d=3 and d=5d=5d=5 to within their sampling uncertainty. Then, we show that the d=3d=3d=3 and d=5d=5d=5 circuits actually have fault distances of dfault=2d_{\text{fault}}=2dfault​=2 and dfault=3d_{\text{fault}}=3dfault​=3 respectively, explaining the similar distance degrading effects from the companion code of [Quantum 10, 2134 (2026)].
Magic state cultivation is a promising method for preparing high-fidelity non-Clifford resource states - a central component of fault-tolerant quantum computing - with low spacetime overhead. In benchmarking cultivation, existing resource estimates assume access to noiseless transversal measurement of the output magic state to allow for postselection during the final escape stage of the cultivation process. However, such measurements would destroy the magic state and are therefore unavailable during computation. We develop an open-boundary postselection method, Caliper, that uses only nondestructive mid-circuit syndrome information and substantially outperforms existing methods operating under these constraints. In some regimes, our postselection method uniquely recovers the resource efficiency of prior estimates. However, in other cases, we observe a tradeoff. At spacetime costs reported in previous works, the achievable logical error rates can be orders of magnitude higher, and recovering the reported logical error rate requires substantially larger codes and longer escape stages. Our results highlight how practical considerations involving mid-circuit postselection can impact the design and performance of magic state cultivation protocols.
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.