Magic state cultivation on a superconducting quantum processor
Quantum Physics
2025-12-17 v1
Abstract
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.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2512.13908,
title = {Magic state cultivation on a superconducting quantum processor},
author = {Emma Rosenfeld and Craig Gidney and Gabrielle Roberts and Alexis Morvan and Nathan Lacroix and Dvir Kafri and Jeffrey Marshall and Ming Li and Volodymyr Sivak and Dmitry Abanin and Amira Abbas and Rajeev Acharya and Laleh Aghababaie Beni and Georg Aigeldinger and Ross Alcaraz and Sayra Alcaraz and Trond I. Andersen and Markus Ansmann and Frank Arute and Kunal Arya and Walt Askew and Nikita Astrakhantsev and Juan Atalaya and Ryan Babbush and Brian Ballard and Joseph C. Bardin and Hector Bates and Andreas Bengtsson and Majid Bigdeli Karimi and Alexander Bilmes and Simon Bilodeau and Felix Borjans and Jenna Bovaird and Dylan Bowers and Leon Brill and Peter Brooks and Michael Broughton and David A. Browne and Brett Buchea and Bob B. Buckley and Tim Burger and Brian Burkett and Nicholas Bushnell and Jamal Busnaina and Anthony Cabrera and Juan Campero and Hung-Shen Chang and Silas Chen and Zijun Chen and Ben Chiaro and Liang-Ying Chih and Agnetta Y. Cleland and Bryan Cochrane and Matt Cockrell and Josh Cogan and Paul Conner and Harold Cook and Rodrigo G. Cortiñas and William Courtney and Alexander L. Crook and Ben Curtin and Martin Damyanov and Sayan Das and Dripto M. Debroy and Sean Demura and Paul Donohoe and Ilya Drozdov and Andrew Dunsworth and Valerie Ehimhen and Alec Eickbusch and Aviv Moshe Elbag and Lior Ella and Mahmoud Elzouka and David Enriquez and Catherine Erickson and Lara Faoro and Vinicius S. Ferreira and Marcos Flores and Leslie Flores Burgos and Sam Fontes and Ebrahim Forati and Jeremiah Ford and Brooks Foxen and Masaya Fukami and Alan Wing Lun Fung and Lenny Fuste and Suhas Ganjam and Gonzalo Garcia and Christopher Garrick and Robert Gasca and Helge Gehring and Robert Geiger and Élie Genois and William Giang and Dar Gilboa and James E. Goeders and Edward C. Gonzales and Raja Gosula and Stijn J. de Graaf and Alejandro Grajales Dau and Dietrich Graumann and Joel Grebel and Alex Greene and Jonathan A. Gross and Jose Guerrero and Loïck Le Guevel and Tan Ha and Steve Habegger and Tanner Hadick and Ali Hadjikhani and Michael C. Hamilton and Monica Hansen and Matthew P. Harrigan and Sean D. Harrington and Jeanne Hartshorn and Stephen Heslin and Paula Heu and Oscar Higgott and Reno Hiltermann and Jeremy Hilton and Hsin-Yuan Huang and Mike Hucka and Christopher Hudspeth and Ashley Huff and William J. Huggins and Lev B. Ioffe and Evan Jeffrey and Shaun Jevons and Zhang Jiang and Xiaoxuan Jin and Chaitali Joshi and Pavol Juhas and Andreas Kabel and Hui Kang and Kiseo Kang and Amir H. Karamlou and Ryan Kaufman and Kostyantyn Kechedzhi and Tanuj Khattar and Mostafa Khezri and Seon Kim and Paul V. Klimov and Can M. Knaut and Bryce Kobrin and Alexander N. Korotkov and Fedor Kostritsa and John Mark Kreikebaum and Ryuho Kudo and Ben Kueffler and Arun Kumar and Vladislav D. Kurilovich and Vitali Kutsko and Tiano Lange-Dei and Brandon W. Langley and Pavel Laptev and Kim-Ming Lau and Emma Leavell and Justin Ledford and Joy Lee and Kenny Lee and Brian J. Lester and Wendy Leung and Lily Li and Wing Yan Li and Alexander T. Lill and William P. Livingston and Matthew T. Lloyd and Aditya Locharla and Laura De Lorenzo and Erik Lucero and Daniel Lundahl and Aaron Lunt and Sid Madhuk and Aniket Maiti and Ashley Maloney and Salvatore Mandrà and Leigh S. Martin and Orion Martin and Eric Mascot and Paul Masih Das and Dmitri Maslov and Melvin Mathews and Cameron Maxfield and Jarrod R. McClean and Matt McEwen and Seneca Meeks and Anthony Megrant and Kevin C. Miao and Zlatko K. Minev and Reza Molavi and Sebastian Molina and Shirin Montazeri and Charles Neill and Michael Newman and Anthony Nguyen and Murray Nguyen and Chia-Hung Ni and Murphy Yuezhen Niu and Nicholas Noll and Logan Oas and William D. Oliver and Raymond Orosco and Kristoffer Ottosson and Alice Pagano and Agustin Di Paolo and Sherman Peek and David Peterson and Alex Pizzuto and Elias Portoles and Rebecca Potter and Orion Pritchard and Michael Qian and Chris Quintana and Ganesh Ramachandran and Arpit Ranadive and Matthew J. Reagor and Rachel Resnick and David M. Rhodes and Daniel Riley and Roberto Rodriguez and Emma Ropes and Lucia B. De Rose and Eliott Rosenberg and Dario Rosenstock and Elizabeth Rossi and Pedram Roushan and David A. Rower and Robert Salazar and Kannan Sankaragomathi and Murat Can Sarihan and Max Schaefer and Sebastian Schroeder and Henry F. Schurkus and Aria Shahingohar and Michael J. Shearn and Aaron Shorter and Noah Shutty and Vladimir Shvarts and Spencer Small and W. Clarke Smith and David A. Sobel and Barrett Spells and Sofia Springer and George Sterling and Jordan Suchard and Aaron Szasz and Alexander Sztein and Madeline Taylor and Jothi Priyanka Thiruraman and Douglas Thor and Dogan Timucin and Eifu Tomita and Alfredo Torres and M. Mert Torunbalci and Hao Tran and Abeer Vaishnav and Justin Vargas and Sergey Vdovichev and Guifre Vidal and Benjamin Villalonga and Catherine Vollgraff Heidweiller and Meghan Voorhees and Steven Waltman and Jonathan Waltz and Shannon X. Wang and Danni Wang and Brayden Ware and James D. Watson and Yonghua Wei and Travis Weidel and Theodore White and Kristi Wong and Bryan W. K. Woo and Christopher J. Wood and Maddy Woodson and Cheng Xing and Z. Jamie Yao and Ping Yeh and Bicheng Ying and Juhwan Yoo and Noureldin Yosri and Elliot Young and Grayson Young and Adam Zalcman and Ran Zhang and Yaxing Zhang and Ningfeng Zhu and Nicholas Zobrist and Zhenjie Zou and Hartmut Neven and Sergio Boixo and Cody Jones and Julian Kelly and Alexandre Bourassa and Kevin J. Satzinger},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.13908},
year = {2025}
}