English

Magic State Distillation: Not as Costly as You Think

Quantum Physics 2019-12-04 v3

Abstract

Despite significant overhead reductions since its first proposal, magic state distillation is often considered to be a very costly procedure that dominates the resource cost of fault-tolerant quantum computers. The goal of this work is to demonstrate that this is not true. By writing distillation circuits in a form that separates qubits that are capable of error detection from those that are not, most logical qubits used for distillation can be encoded at a very low code distance. This significantly reduces the space-time cost of distillation, as well as the number of qubits. In extreme cases, it can cost less to distill a magic state than to perform a logical Clifford gate on full-distance logical qubits.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1905.06903,
  title  = {Magic State Distillation: Not as Costly as You Think},
  author = {Daniel Litinski},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.06903},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

22 pages, 22 figures; Supplementary Material can be found at https://github.com/litinski/magicstates ; v2: Fixed a mistake in the protocol and updated overhead estimates; v3: Added Appendix on faulty T measurements