Identifying necessary and sufficient conditions for universal quantum computing is a long-standing open problem for which contextuality is, perhaps, the only promising solution [Howard et al., Nature (London) 510, 351 (2014)]. To justify this conjecture, Howard et al. showed that contextuality is equivalent to Wigner negativity for qudits, and is therefore necessary and possibly sufficient for qudit magic state distillation. Here, we reformulate magic state distillation in the language of discrete phase space, to show that any finite qudit magic state distillation routine contains bound states outside the Wigner polytope; these states exhibit contextuality but are useless for magic state distillation.
Determining the best attainable threshold for qudit magic state distillation is directly related to the question of whether or not contextuality is sufficient for universal quantum computation. We show that the performance of a qudit correcting code for magic state distillation is captured by its complete weight enumerator. For the qutrit strange state -- a maximally magic non-stabilizer state -- the performance of a code is captured by its simple weight enumerator. This result allows us to carry out an extensive search for high-threshold magic state distillation routines for the strange state. Our search covers all
[[n,1]]3 qutrit stabilizer codes with a complete set of transversal Clifford gates for
n≤23, and all
[[n,1]]3 stabilizer codes with a transversal
H2 gate with
n≤9 qudits. For
n=23, we find over 600 CSS codes that can distill the qutrit strange state with cubic noise suppression. While none of these codes surpass the threshold of the 11-qutrit Golay code, their existence suggests that, for large codes, the ability to distill the qutrit strange state is somewhat generic.
Qudits offer the potential for low-overhead magic state distillation, although previous results for asymptotically good codes have required qudit dimension
q≫100 or code length
N≫100. These parameters far exceed experimental demonstrations of qudit platforms, and thus motivate the search for better codes. Using a novel lifting procedure, we construct the first family of good triorthogonal codes on the
F22m alphabet with
m≥3 that lies above the Tsfasman-Vladut-Zink bound. These codes yield a family of asymptotically good quantum codes with transversal CCZ gates, enabling constant space overhead magic state distillation with qudit dimension as small as
q=64. Further, we identify a promising code with parameters
[[42,14,6]]64. Finally, we show that a distilled
∣CCZ⟩22m can be reduced to a
∣CCZ⟩2n state for arbitrary
n with a constant-depth Clifford circuit of at most 9 computational basis measurements, 12 single-qudit and 9 two-qudit Clifford gates.