Simulating magic state cultivation with few Clifford terms
Abstract
Building upon [arXiv:2509.01224], we present a few methods on how to simulate the non-Clifford magic state cultivation circuits [arXiv:2409.17595] with a sum of Clifford ZX-diagrams on average, at noise. Compared to a magic cat state stabiliser decomposition of all non-Clifford spiders ( terms required), this is more than times reduction in the number of terms. Our stabiliser decomposition has the advantage of representing the final non-Clifford state (in light of circuit errors) as a sum of Clifford ZX-diagrams. This will be useful in simulating the escape stage of magic state cultivation, where one needs to port the resultant state of cultivation into a larger Clifford circuit with many more qubits. Still, it's necessary to only track Clifford terms. Our result sheds light on the simulability of operationally relevant, high -count quantum circuits with some internal structure. Finally, we provide numerical results for full non-Clifford stabiliser rank simulation based on along with optimisations using our cutting decompositions. Nearly shots per second can be obtained on a laptop for the smaller circuits at SD6 circuit level noise , making it only times slower than its (circuit-unspecific and un-optimised) fully Clifford proxy simulation via using gates.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2509.08658,
title = {Simulating magic state cultivation with few Clifford terms},
author = {Kwok Ho Wan and Zhenghao Zhong and Ainhoa Zapirain},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.08658},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
v7-updated references and additional author added