English

Recursive Magic State Distillation on the Surface Code

Quantum Physics 2026-03-06 v1

Abstract

I reduce the cost to prepare magic states with lattice surgery operations on the surface code by using a recursive implementation of 15-to-1 magic state distillation. On a rotated surface code with distance dd, T|T\rangle preparation requires a dd-by-3d3 d grid of data qubits for up to 15d15 d error correction cycles, and CCZ|CCZ\rangle preparation requires a 3d3 d-by-2d2 d grid for up to 10.5d10.5 d cycles. However, a significantly lower physical error threshold than that of the underlying surface code is required to match the error probability of the output magic state with the logical error rate of the output surface code at large code distances.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.05409,
  title  = {Recursive Magic State Distillation on the Surface Code},
  author = {Jonathan E. Moussa},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.05409},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

20 pages, 10 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:05:17.821Z